Snowfall Scofflaws

'Tis the season for many of us to celebrate the transformed landscape, and for some to complain about its considerable gravity. We received our first major snow this week. My definition of major is 4", my threshold for firing up the snowblower. Below that, my aging back moves the mess; above that, I wrestle the heavy contraption and it pitches a blizzard where I desire.

There are two types of people in this world--those who shovel after the storm and scofflaws. Our neighbor Frida is the most dedicated shoveler in south Minneapolis. She works continuously from the descent of the first flake until spring to ensure that snow never taints her driveway, using a small snowblower, a leaf blower, road salt, and even an actual shovel in continuous rotation. She also keeps the sidewalks clear, of course, but where she starts to get a little kooky is by clearing the strip between the walk and the street. I think I've finally persuaded her to not push that particular snow into the traffic lanes, which is entirely counterproductive, given that the strip is the place where plows deposit the street snow. But her grandest achievement, after the recent dump of 8+ inches, is the clearing of her entire yard down to the grass. Where does it go? Into her neighbors' yards, of course. Not that I would mind this if we lived next door, but the dearth of logic behind this Sisyphean endeavor baffles me. I mean, if it's a good idea to shovel the yard (!!), why dump it on your neighbor? So, Frida is one extreme.

On the other extreme is Gustafson, across the street. Like us, he has a corner lot, so his work is cut out for him. Which makes no difference--he might shovel a thin path to his doorway from the street so he can prance in sneakers to his car. But if he ever clears the corner, which is used ever day by dozens of schoolkids awaiting the bus, it's two weeks after the fact following a prolonged thaw. "See! I'm shovelin'!" he seems to boast as he stops to catch his breath every thirty seconds. Gustafson isn't such a bad guy, but he has already reserved a stained couch seat in the Slacker Hall of Fame.

Finally, there are those who never seem to grasp the rhythm of the city's street plowing process--the arcane Snow Emergency. I don't mind so much those who actually get caught and towed, though they can stuff their complaints. They, at least, are forced to ransom their autos to ensure future snow removal. It's the one's that don't get hooked before the plow comes through that trample my civic sensibilities. They are a menace, scofflaws of the winter streets, sitting for weeks safely within levees of chunky, salty, grey-white snow; icebound monuments of apathy.

It's hard work, this seasonal rearrangement of precipitation that refuses to flow. It's also a simple civic gesture, one of the few ways we as residents are required to pitch in and help a city function. But the requirements, like the abominable snowman after elfin dentistry, are mostly toothless.

Winter Roost

To me, winter hardship means getting up for work in the morning before the kitchen has hit 60 degrees. I suppose I could encourage the furnace to awaken earlier, but hot coffee usually provides heat enough. When I glance out the window to the first grey winter light of a Minneapolis morning, I inevitably see a few crows headed southwest, flying in dips and swoops as though it's windy, even when calm and 10 below. I would rather not be that cold, I think, clutching my hands around the warm mug.

But crows are winter roosters here in this part of the state. Ravens stay in the north woods year round, but their smaller cousins migrate slightly south, to dense aggregations where scavenging is good. I see them in the evenings too, a steady stream flying northeast on the last light of day, seemingly endless. But just where they go, I have never known. So I endeavored to find out.

Common sense would suggest that they head for the river, where plenty of trees line the banks and the closest thing to a natural order reigns. I planned to head down there some evening, tracing a line, quite literally as the crow flies, from our neighborhood to the Mississippi below St. Anthony Falls and the University. So imagine my surprise when driving home from work last night, just after the early dusk of a pre-solstice sunset, to notice a cloud of crows circling the I-94/35W commons, and alighting en masse in the trees of the neighborhoods that overlook this urban tangle.

The ecologist Bernd Heinrich has written a wonderful book about the habits of denizens of the snowy north, Winter World : The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, which will provide answers to anyone who has wondered how turtles get by for six months without taking a breath, or speculated about the marginal caloric economy of a tiny chickadee. I was pleased to find that he confirmed my experience--biologists have noticed over the past 50 years that crows have begun to prefer roosting in cities in the winter, and choose the brightest, noisiest places. Heinrich speculates that they may have learned to do so because such an environment discourages the crow's top predator, the great horned owl.

But why do they get together in the first place? Protection via group awareness is one likely reason. But Heinrich's theory, the result of detailed observations of ravens in the winter woods, is that corvids (crows, ravens, blackbirds, and grackles are good examples) benefit from communal information-sharing about the location of food sources in the lean months. Imagine the mother lode that might satisfy the largest conventions: Heinrich writes that some crow roosts out west contain several million individuals! But even our urban gathering could draw hundreds of thousands of birds.

Review: Down from Basswood by Lynn Maria Laitala

I read and write for a living, which is probably why I don't take on as much fiction as I would like these days. A few years ago, during the lengthy layoff which gave me time to write Eating Crow, I read constantly--I remember ingesting ten of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels in a two-month period. What precious time I now have to dedicate to the printed page tends to go to journalism, in that furious scramble to always stay on top of events; to remain politically fluent and relevant. But once in a while an intriguing volume lands in my lap and I have to give it a look.

One recent example was Mark Munger's Suomalaiset, People of the Marsh, which chronicles the Finnish-American experience in northeastern Minnesota in the early 20th century. Judge Munger is obviously a capable researcher, but in attempting a historical novel, it's almost as if he forgot to remove the footnotes and cross references. Suomalaiset is often smothered in verisimilitude--brands of beer, descriptions of settings, name-dropping--and this fetish was ultimately puzzling. Lack of editorial rigor, I suppose. The result was a bland amalgamation of pulp fiction and history, as though two books had been mistakenly bound as one. I'm glad I read it, because his attention to detail helped to inform my grasp of the subject and confirm my own work, but I cannot say that I was entertained.

Lynn Maria Laitala, however, has done a superb job with Down from Basswood. This book had escaped my attention since it came out in 2002, but was recently recommended by a local editor. Laitala is a trained historian, and I believe this book resulted from her dedicated effort to record the oral histories of members of the Finnish and Ojibwe communities near Ely, Minnesota. Down from Basswood is not threaded around a unifying plot; it is, rather, a series of interrelated short stories about individuals on the margins of the economy and civilization in the first half of the 20th century. Every chapter chronicles the small triumph or profound tragedy of a character, each informed by Laitala's astute take on the political dimensions of the time and the harsh economic climate. Laitala's sensibilities are unabashedly rooted in northeastern Minnesota's union/socialist tradition, but this book cannot be pigeonholed as a polemic--her touch is very light, her characters are not simply victims but fallible, and their plight is always uncertain. I continually found myself pleased by small writerly details, and I suppose stumbling upon passages that I wish I'd written is the heart of the reason why I read fiction.

Perhaps the genius behind Down from Basswood is the notion that documentaries, at best, are more compelling and moving than drama. Lynn Maria Laitala has managed to exploit the seam between the two. In so doing, she has written the best book about the Arrowhead region that I have read, and a volume that could sit confidently on the shelf beside Main Street, Giants in the Earth, North Star Country, or Staggerford.