Craig Medred writes the Outdoors column for the Anchorage Daily News.  For several years after he started the column, I didn’t much like the guy.  He seemed to me like a city guy with pretensions to the wilderness life.  Since then, he has spent more time in the wild, as have I, and both of us have had some rough experiences and got through them alive, against the odds.  I’m liking him better all the time, and that is only partially because of the woods cred he has gained, and his more philosophical tone in general.

His column today is worth reading in its entirety, and I’ll give you a few highlights to tempt you.  He starts off talking about this weird country where, when an attention-hungry politician “pardons” a Thanksgiving turkey — while in the background wholesale bloody turkey slaughter is going on…

After enlightening the clueless among his readers that their Thanksgiving turkeys were once living, breathing, beings, he goes on to clue them in to who Sarah Palin is:

In the midst of his philosophical musings on politics and culture, Craig asks, “If Turkeygate is a story because Palin engages in the silly business of “pardoning” a turkey then does an interview while the rest of the flock dies, how do you not show the dying turkeys? That’s the whole point of the story, and it’s not like a turkey never dies on TV.”

At the end, he finishes up with these words that have earned him an even greater measure of my respect:

Follow this link to read all of ‘Turkeygate’ fiasco is prime example of weirdness.

It snowed all night last night, and I was up several hours before dawn today.  If I allowed the sun to determine my sleep time, I’d lose a lot of active time in winter, and in summer I would miss a lot more sleep than I already do.  Today, here at 62° N, we had six hours and three minutes of daylight.  Tomorrow, it will be five hours and fifty-eight minutes.  After a light breakfast and some coffee, I killed some time with a video, then replied to some comments on Xanga while I waited for daylight before going out to shovel the six inches or so of new snow.

A year and a half ago, I wrote about how I managed to get out and about in summer and do a little berrypicking, even with M.E. and chronic fatigue.  As I was taking my first sit-down rest during today’s snow shoveling, I decided to document this, too.  “First sit-down rest,” but not even remotely the first rest.  Every long pass with the snow pusher, or every 2 or three short push-and-throw passes, I stop and lean on the shovel while I catch my breath.

I had cleared the porch and steps, and the path to the outhouse, and got a few feet past the end of the trailer, up to the back of Lassie, the old AMC Eagle at center, before I sat for the first time.  It was almost full light, but the sun wasn’t up yet.  My POV here is seated on the lid of an ice chest on the porch of the storage cabin beside our trailer.  At the time, Doug was on the roof, clearing it.  He had already shoveled the path visible on the left, just in front of the trailer, leading to the base of the ladder leaning against the far side of the trailer.

I put the camera in its waterproof cover (two layers of plastic grocery bags) and stuck it back in its case, hanging on a hook just inside the door, and sat until the cold got to me.  Then I got up and went to work again — push a little, lean on the shovel a while, then push a little more snow around.

The next time I went in for the camera before sitting to rest, Koji wanted out.  By then, a couple of hours had passed and I had slowly cleared the path to Doug’s chopping block on the right side of Lassie, made one pass along Lassie’s left side and past the driver’s door of my Subaru, Blur, and started brushing the snow off Blur.  Doug was still working on the roof.

I had cleared all the snow from my car and was shoveling my way around the car when Doug finished the roof and went in the house for a break and something warm to drink.  In a while, he came back out to tell me that Greyfox had called.  I went in to take his call and got some sit-down rest at that time.  When I was ready to go back out, Doug went with me.  He made the first full-length pass down the driveway and across the road, dumping the snow from the sleigh shovel over the berm on the far side.

I needed that help, because the plow still has not come by here and I wasn’t up to pushing that much snow in the big sleigh shovel, or pushing it up over the berm.  He cleared a path across the road that I could follow, and broke down the berm to make it easier for me to get my loaded shovel over.  While he was working on the driveway, I cleared the path beyond the outhouse to the compost pile.

The sun was low in the south-southwest by the time we had cleared away all that we intended to.  I took a moment as the sun was going down, went out and got some shots of the finished job.  I had worn out and quit before the driveway was done, and Doug finished up while I chopped vegies and started a stir-fry.

I don’t know if I overdid today.  I’ll know by the time I get out of bed tomorrow.  What I know now is that I pulled a muscle in my right thigh, and the muscles in my neck and shoulders are on fire.  I’m tired but happy, as usual when I get something useful done.

This is the end of our driveway, out to the beginning of the untracked snow at center, which is the edge of the road.  Doug added a second and third furrow across the road and over the berm while he was clearing the driveway.  If the plow comes by tonight, there will be a berm across the driveway to clear tomorrow.

Just in case someone wondered what the tall obscure object with the rounded top is at the back of Lassie in the center of the top 3 shots, it is a sled, heavy duty type, about seven feet long, and handy for hauling things… whatever needs to be hauled.  Wood and water are the things we have hauled, mostly, and moose guts once.

I don’t know what my personal annual carbon emissions are.  Various online calculators show results that range from slightly under 2 tons of carbon dioxide a year to just over 30.  The discrepancy makes sense to me when I think about the questions each of those sites asks, and the things they all leave out.  None of them is set up to comprehensively reflect my lifestyle and its environmental impact.  That’s what I get for living on the edge.

I call my footprint, “disgraceful,” because I can’t help contrasting it to what it was when I was able to live as I chose, and to how much smaller it would be if I had the means to make some changes.  When I lived off the grid and started my small gasoline generator only every week or two to charge the old car battery that powered my radio, I had no car and got much of my food from gardening, wild foraging, and fishing.  I had a barely discernible carbon footprint then.

Loss of physical capacity has cut my gardening down to nearly nothing, and reduced my wild foraging even more.  I haven’t gone fishing in years, but I still do receive excess game and fish from friends and neighbors.  The carbon calculators can go wildly wrong in either direction when trying to estimate my footprint based on diet.  They all ask if we’re omnivorous, vegan, or vegetarian.  Only one asked where we live.  Points are given (carbon points deducted) for not eating meat, but most Alaskan vegans use more carbon than we do because their fresh vegetables arrive here on an airplane.  In winter, most of the fruits and vegetables available in stores are from the southern hemisphere.

Some of the calculators score us on the basis of our shopping habits.  They give points (deduct carbon) for shopping at thrift stores, but none of the calculators recognizes dumpster diving.  Anyone who has never picked her way across the stinky terrain of a public dump or gone over the edge of a dumpster to see what was in a bulging garbage bag, can’t know how unjust it is not to recognize the dumpster divers’ contribution to the ecology. 

Sunday at AIH, a male employee asked Greyfox where he got his Ebert & Roeper gimme cap.  Greyfox hesitated, thinking, trying to remember.  I prompted him:  “thrift store?  …dumpster?”  He said yeah, it had to be one of those, and the man gave him look of distaste and uneasily said, “Thanks for that…. little bit of information.”  I think he was implying it was too much information, but he had asked, hadn’t he?  A young woman employee who heard the exchange, volunteered that when she lived in the dorms at U of A there was always fine pickings in the dumpsters at end of term.  We congratulated each other on our thrift and environmental awareness, and the man with the stick up his butt walked away.

I do think there is virtue in scavenging others’ waste, as there is in reusing and recycling one’s own.  I confess that I might make more of it than it deserves because it helps me compensate for the ways in which my lifestyle crosses the line in the other direction. 

I eat local produce as much as I can.  On my last shopping trip, I bought organically grown carrots from this very valley, and potatoes.  Buying Alaskan carrots and potatoes is a sacrifice.  The price is usually higher than for California carrots and Idaho spuds, and the flavor of Alaskan root vegies is not “right” — not what my palate is trained to recognize as potato or carrot.  The short season, cool temperatures, and acid soil here grow bitter carrots and sweet, waxy potatoes.  After thirty-some years here, I am used to them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still notice the difference and appreciate an occasional exotic treat.

I cannot afford local eggs, even when they are available, which is rare.  State law prevents local goat herders from selling their milk, so I buy imported milk.  Alaska does not produce tree fruits at all, nor melons, nor winter squash.  I like those things and buy them sometimes, but infrequently.

Crops such as celery and lettuce are available only for a brief summer season, and at a premium over airfreighted produce.  We grow no grains, no long-season shell peas or dry beans, and the few green beans and snap peas available in summer are as exorbitant as the few greenhouse-grown tomatoes and peppers.  It costs five or six dollars in summer for a small local green pepper, as opposed to under a dollar in summer or about two dollars in winter, for one flown in from California, Mexico, or Chile.  Zucchini and cabbage grow like crazy in the midnight sun, and there is always a surplus of them during the short harvest season.  Too bad I’m allergic to cabbage, eh?  A balanced diet is not easy to achieve without spending a lot of money and leaving an enormous carbon footprint.

Much easier for me is keeping down my energy consumption.  Frugal habits of a lifetime, reinforced in the environmentally aware 1960s, have really burrowed in and taken root since I have lived here where money is scarce and everything one buys is rather dear.  Our annual electricity consumption last year was 4,041 KWH, way below the national household average.  The wood we burn for heat emits much less toxic smoke than the coal and fuel oil that are the common alternatives here.  I drive a small station wagon with good mileage, and drove it less than 1,000 miles in the past year.

Still, if I could, I would build a big greenhouse over a warm spring, grow my own food, and heat my house from the combination of solar and geothermal energy.  I would scavenge more of other people’s trash.  Even if I were wealthy, I wouldn’t want to stop dragging the goodies out of the garbage.  I would like to be able to recycle more of my trash than I now can in Alaska.  A recycling center in Anchorage recently shut down after a mere decade or two of operation, because it was not cost-effective to ship the stuff they collected Outside, and there is no industry here to use it. 

I don’t think I’d want to go forever without another Idaho potato, but maybe, if I were to sail a boat to the West Coast and hitchhike to Idaho, I could have one I’d feel good about.

I drove to Wasilla yesterday, one of the necessary periodic supply runs.  We were out of kitty litter, almost out of cat food.  Doug had been out of cow’s milk for over a week and I was down to my last quart of goat’s milk.  The shopping list was long, and there were library books to be returned.

The trip had been planned since early in the week.  One day and another were crossed off for various reasons.  Greyfox had a show on Saturday, so Sunday was the first convenient time for the whole family.  Doug would be up during the day to keep the home fires burning.  The first minor hitch was when Greyfox phoned as I was putting my hat on, to say there was a snowstorm going on at his end of the valley.

The temperature was in the teens above zero here, so I had no doubts about my car starting.  Doug had gone out at the crack of dawn, brushing snow from my car and shoveling the bit of driveway directly behind my car.  I was tired before I got out of bed, from the fatiguing activities of the previous day, finding and gathering things I needed to take to town with me.  I had already asked an oracle whether it would be better to put the trip off, and got a clear indication that Sunday would be better than Monday.  Greyfox said since I was the one doing the driving, the decision was up to me.

It wasn’t snowing here when I left just after full daylight, some time after nine.  The northbound lane of the highway was clear of snow from the constant traffic of weekenders coming out from Anchorage.  My lane was full of the snow blown over there by the wind of their passage, and my visibility was greatly diminished every time I met a string of them — half a dozen or so SUVs or pickups trailering snowmobiles, piled up behind, and eager to pass, somebody observing the speed limit.

I didn’t run into snowfall until I was in Willow, halfway to Wasilla.  The traffic flow headed into town was slower than the eager oncoming Anchoraguan recreationalists.  Deepening snow on the roadway and decreased visibility from the falling snow were keeping us down to the speed limit.  The limit drops to 45 in Houston, and coming out of there, the flow of traffic didn’t rise for the rest of the way into Wasilla.  I didn’t mind.

Greyfox was ready when I got to his cabin, standing by the car before I was done gathering his mail and stuff out of the passenger seat.  We’d agreed to have breakfast together, so our first stop was the Roadside Inn.  Over food we talked about news, politics, and recent scientific discoveries, the same sort of stuff we spend cell minutes discussing every day.

Since I was beginning the day with leftover fatigue from the day before, and traffic and road conditions were brutal, I decided to make as few shopping stops as possible.  Greyfox went in with me at Carr’s supermarket, largely because my defroster is anemic and breathing in my car waiting for me would have fogged my windows.  It was the first time he has accompanied me when I was using the crip cart.  They call them “scooters”, I guess, but to me the word, “scooter”, conjures an image of me as a kid zipping along on a low-riding two-wheeler, propelling myself with one foot.

We had fun together, even though I did become a little grumpy and snappish at him for walking right up in front of my vehicle, just standing there looking at me as if he expected me to go somewhere or do something.  When I heard myself snap at him, I transcended that mood and made an effort to calmly point out that he was blocking my way.  We bantered our way through the rest of our shopping with no casualties, getting some laughs out of ridiculous mini-muffin baking cups and the alphabetization of Chinese five spice. 

After grocery shopping, we stopped at AIH, Alaska Industrial Hardware, for creosote destroyer and new protective gloves for stoking the woodstove.  I bought welders’ gloves, lined with cotton and stitched with Kevlar.  The same avid light that dawned in Greyfox’s eyes when he saw that “Kevlar” label, lit up Doug’s eyes when I got home with the new gloves.  What is it about guys and Kevlar, anyway?

I was about to throw away the old gloves when I decided to get a photo documenting their condition, alongside the new gloves already smudged with soot.  The split seams are the result of the stitches, some kind of polymer I suppose, melting from the heat.  The lining in the old gloves was a knit polymer, and had also melted away in spots.  I can match the burns on my fingers to the holes in the gloves.  The new ones are soo sweeet!

I dropped Greyfox at his cabin before going on to the big box store on the hill above his place for the rest of my shopping.  Then I stopped back at his place to pick up some dumpster food and clothing he’d collected for me, and to look through his video collection for interesting titles.  Doug had finally hooked up the DVD player that Greyfox gave us when he got his new one, so now I can watch a DVD while he plays the XBox or PS2, instead of having to interrupt play for video.

The drive home was harrowing and exhausting.  Once again, I was going against the flow and the snowmachiners hurrying back to Anchorage were blinding me with their lights while blowing the snow from their lane into mine.  Between Houston and Willow, I went through several miles of blinding snowstorm.  When I turned off onto back roads for the last leg of the trip, there was about a foot of snow accumulated and a chaotic collection of wobbly, wavery, weaving tire ruts I had to navigate through.

I made it home okay, of course and obviously.  I slept fitfully as always when I’m extremely fatigued.  In a day or two I will have gotten enough rest to be able to sleep well — maybe.  Doug shoveled the path to his wood chopping area yesterday.  The driveway, paths to the outhouse, compost pile, and base of the ladder to the roof, plus the roof itself and the roof of the little cabin beside the trailer, all need to be shoveled, and Doug has an RPG session scheduled this afternoon.

I need to get suited up and out there to push some snow around.  Seeya later.  Enjoy the shots of early light I captured today.

It was in the teens below zero (F) this morning, and the car didn’t start on my first few tries.  Before running the battery down, I got out the charger to give it a boost.   That entailed dragging out a monstrous fifty-foot industrial strength extension cord, plugging it into the new copper-wired GFI (ground fault interrupter) outlet box on the front outside wall (very nifty, very safe and convenient), and trying to keep the dog and his chain from interfering with my work or becoming entangled with the cord.

Before I could open the hood to hook the charger up to the battery, I brushed several inches of snow off it.  I had to tug hard… very hard… holding my breath and praying it was just hard enough, on the hood release knob under the dash, to release the latch, without breaking the cable or the plastic handle.  That was the hardest part, and the scary part.  How would I get the hood open if I broke it?  You tell me.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d call AAA.  That would at least give a few strangers something to share over coffee and have a few laughs.

While the battery was charging, I cooked breakfast and Doug and I discussed gloves.  He has a sturdy pair of leather gloves he uses for wood splitting in warmer weather.  They are not big enough to be worn over warm liners.  When it gets cold, gloves become an issue.  He has a relatively new pair of leather snowmobile gloves that are too flimsy, really, for wood splitting, but he uses them anyway, and now they are showing the wear.  Today, he ended up wearing an old pair of gloves he’s had since before he got the leather ones.  I think they were originally made of heavy nylon canvas, but now they are mostly made of duct tape.  With two pairs of liners inside, one silvery mylar mesh and one of polar fleece, his old duct tape gloves got him through the wood splitting and the jug filling and hauling.

It was beautiful out there this morning.  It was light, but the sun wasn’t yet up and I could see a sliver of moon over the trees.  If it hadn’t been so cold, I would have taken the camera along to the spring.  The manual says not to operate my FinePix S602Z at below 50°F.  The first few years I had the thing, I didn’t.   Then I decided I might as well not have a camera as to have such a fair weather one.  I started taking it out when temps were in the forties, then in the thirties.  Last month I think I found its real temperature limit.  At about five below zero, it shut itself down after several minutes and about six shots.

 

Now, if I have a special shot I want when it is cold outside, such as this one of my back yard, I stick a plastic bag in my pocket, grab the camera, go out, grab a shot or two, shut down the camera, and stick it in the bag so it can’t collect moisture from the air when I go back in, and let it warm up in the bag before saving my shots to the hard drive.  Ha!  Fuji never knew they were making a subzero camera.

I’m s’pozed to go to Wasilla on Sunday for supplies.  That means I have today and tomorrow to get ready.  I need to gather up a bunch of books to return to the library, and videos to return to Greyfox.  The shopping list has to be transcribed from the magnet on front of the fridge to a scrap of paper.  I need to find something to wear that’s warm, and also appropriate for wearing in public.  That’s the hard part.  I haven’t been to the laundromat in way too long.  Fortunately, if I make it to town, I won’t need to do laundry for a while longer.  Greyfox has found me some more clothes in the dumpsters, and he said he’d be washing them today.

My next chore right now is to get out there, coil that big extension cord, and put it away before the dog destroys it or it becomes buried in snow.

Runty little Ted, comfy and warm today with his normal-sized littermate Roosevelt, disappeared the day after I posted about him earlier this month for my three little thankfuls.  He had gone out with his brothers to play in the fluffy, falling snow, and didn’t come back.

Doug and I went out, walked around, and called him.  We waited, watched for him, and worried.  The first night, I woke several times when Doug opened the door and plaintively called out to Ted.

Tiny Ted is a favorite, obviously.  Not the only favorite, not for either of us.  With twelve cats in the household, we can have as many favorites as we like.  Doug’s special buddy, his lap cat, his habitual furry seatbelt, is Granny Mousebreath, the catriarch. 

Shallow as I am, my heart has been captured by the most physically beautiful of our cats, Val (AKA Pants, AKA Mr. Personality).

Both of us are especially fond of our two stay-at-homes, Bagel and Fancy, the only ones who prefer not to go outside, even in summer.

But I digress, and I had better quit before I start getting into the favorites of the past.  None of these other adorable cats could compensate us for the loss of little Ted.  Bagel, Ted’s mother, also expressed some distress when she couldn’t find her smallest boy.

The second night that Ted was missing, Doug confessed to me the next morning that he had gone to his room and cried.  I could relate, though I had been shedding no tears.  Ted was in my thoughts all the time.  I was distressed at the thought of that little guy being an owl’s midnight snack.  After the second day gone, I had little hope that he was still alive.

Then on the third day, a neighbor, a woman whose house is at the end of this street, knocked at the door with Ted in her hand, asking if that was my kitten.  Koji was barking insistently, doing his job of scaring the intruder, and she was cooperating with him fully.  I had to assure her that I had a firm grip on Koji’s collar before she would approach close enough to hand me the cat.  She stayed only long enough to tell me she had heard the “kitten” crying near her house and had followed the sound and found him.  I told her he wasn’t as young as he looked, and shouted my sincere thanks as she retreated down the driveway.

He was obviously traumatized by the experience, but seems now to have put it behind him.  A few times, Ted has approached the door as if he wanted to go out with the other cats, but Doug has scooped him up and kept him in.  I don’t suppose we can keep him confined forever.  Next summer, when the window is open and the cats all come and go as they please, he might have another adventure or three.

 

Warning and disclaimer:  I will be writing today about matters that could possibly be interpreted by some as cause for complaint.  Therefore, some might think I’m complaining.  Get this straight:  I’m not complaining, even though complaining about the cold is a favorite Alaskan sport.  We do it competitively, to see who can come up with the best (i.e.: most horrific) cold stories; and we do it intentionally to discourage the discontented and disadvantaged folk from the rest of the world against deciding to come here and californicate our Alaska.

Actually, it is not very cold today.  It is nine below zero, still in single digits and so not particularly life threatening for a person out there with adequate gear.  But it is cold enough.  It was cold enough that the freight train passing on the tracks half a mile away sounded as if it was coming through the front yard.  Koji thought it was.  He woke me about five this morning, barking at the alarming rumble of the train.  He hasn’t barked at a train since he was a puppy, except in cold weather when atmospheric compression enhances the transmission of sound waves.

The sound of that train was my first clue that the temp had dropped another increment during the night.  The previous night, it had been slightly below zero, and through several hours yesterday morning, we had no temperature at all.  Zero point zero on the digital thermometer is as great a cause for humorous comment — “no temperature at all” — as is forty below, where Celsius and Fahrenheit scales cross and it makes no difference whether the temp is C or F.  Forty below has another distinction, as my Old Fart commented during his first winter here a couple of decades ago.  It makes zero seem warm.

Besides being cold enough to make the distant sound of a passing train more immediate, it is cold enough today to motivate Doug to set up the electric heater under the computer desk.  motivate me to urge Doug to set up the electric heater under the computer desk.  One of the copper-wired outlets that Roger installed last month is on the wall behind this desk, just for that purpose.  Until the weather grows much colder, I won’t need my fingerless shooting gloves for work at the keyboard.

I will reiterate:  I’m not complaining.  I am reporting.  It is with a sense of bemusement that this former California girl reports on things like typing in gloves and hauling a wok full of hot coals from the stove out to place under the car engine to get it started.  I do these tasks with a smile and a sense of gratitude, grateful for the gloves, the wok, the fire, and for Alaska itself.  I’m grateful not just for what Alaska has for me, but what it lacks.  There are, here in my valley, no scorpions, no gila monsters, rattlesnakes (nor any snake or lizard), black widow spiders, cockroaches, fleas, ticks, poison oak, poison ivy, killer bees, Lyme disease (yet), bubonic plague (yet), and no hundred-degree days.  I love it… but you’d hate it, believe me.

It is with baffled bemusement that I read comments such as this one on my recent post about snowplow drivers:  “move to Texas it’s warmer here.” [sic] {and also sick}  That writer is not a reader.  She hasn’t — obviously hasn’t — paid much attention to what I have been blogging for the past six and a half years here, hasn’t clicked on my memoir links and read about my time in Texas, or surely she would not say something so stupid, right?  I lived in Texas.  I lived there fifty years ago when Alaska achieved statehood.  Not having been born in Texas, I was able to view with amused pity the chagrined sudden sense of inferiority expressed by Texans who realized they were no longer living in the biggest United State.  Apparently, to many Texans, size does matter.

What matters to me is that Alaska is growing, in ways that have nothing to do with geographical area.  We did not re-elect recently convicted Ted Stevens.  It is official, although the old rascal’s narcissism will probably impel him to demand a recount.  If he thinks he can swing enough influence with the vote counters to swing the numbers his way, he surely will try.  I have no doubt about that.  What I have been wondering about now is whether there is much chance that Anchorage International Airport will get its old name back.  That would be nice.

I was thinking about snow plow drivers while I was out shoveling the driveway this morning.  Doug was on the roof, shoveling snow too.  The plow had gone by fast before dawn today, throwing snow six feet and more beyond the edges of the road, making a wide, shallow berm.

A berm is easier to shovel that way than when the plow goes more slowly and leaves a deeper, narrower, and more compact berm.  I don’t know if the driver thought about that, or cared.  The accumulation on the road wasn’t too heavy, and he might have been moving fast just because he could.

There was nothing much out there to catch my eye today, just a gray sky, a raven that flew over calling a greeting, and a magpie in a treetop making raucous territorial calls.  Somewhere unseen, a parky squirrel was protesting our presence, too.  Pushing the big ergonomic sleigh shovel slowly through the berm, then accelerating across the road to dump the load over the berm on the opposite side didn’t take much thought, so my mind wandered to snow plow drivers.

Any ordinary heavy equipment operator suddenly acquires a great deal of power when he gets in control of a snow plow.  He can make life easier or harder for anyone living on his route, with just a flick of his snow blade.  When we lived across the road, there was a guy who would go by, then reverse, change the angle of his blade, and scoop out the berm he’d left across my driveway.  What a guy!

They can damage or destroy vehicles left in their way, without penalty.  The drivers who carelessly park in a snowplow’s way are more likely to be ticketed for it, even if the vehicle is totaled by a plow.  The plows can, and do, take down road signs and mailboxes, but that’s not exactly allowed.  It just happens.

Our road is one of the lowest priorities for snow removal.  It hadn’t been plowed after a couple of previous snowfalls, and had eight or ten inches of snow covering it and packed in the tracks.  The main highway and paved roads are done first (after the drivers clear their own roads), then the school bus routes on back roads.  Longer, heavier traveled residential roads come next.

It is common for little back roads like ours to go unplowed until the snow builds up to a foot or more.  If it gets too deep, one of the neighbors who have blades on their 4WD pickups will push some of it back.  They don’t always do a professional job, but it makes it easier to get in and out.  We have to go out within the next day or two, to get water.  I’m glad the plow came by today, and glad I had the energy to shovel the driveway.  I hope it doesn’t snow again until after the water run.

When I went to the outhouse around six AM, there were no icicles hanging down over the doorway.

When I opened the door an hour later to let the dog out, there was a three-foot icicle there.