Snow Plowing Memories at the Guy-Land Cafteria

When I drove up to the Guy-Land Cafeteria I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Parked out front was a line of snowplows, reminding me of all the years my husband’s crew did the same after a hard night behind the wheel. It was 11:30 in the morning so these guys were running very late. Most snowplow contracts state, “Plowing is done between midnight and 7:00 AM. The 2” trigger depth must be met by midnight to ensure service by 7:00 AM.” Some people don’t seem to read those contracts and they’ll be on the phone complaining at 6:00 if there’s an inch of snow on their driveway. The later the snow comes the bigger the chance that the plow drivers will be sitting in rush hour traffic not able to get around their route. That’s why they don’t promise/contract daytime plowing. That’s not to say they don’t plow in the daytime. They do, especially if there’s a major blizzard with no end in sight when they’ll plow around the clock. 

Snowplowing is a business that is extremely hard on human bodies and trucks. But there wasn’t a single aspect of plowing that Don didn’t like except maybe the lack of sleep. Even on the nights when we didn’t have to plow we were either up checking lots for that 2” trigger point or to tidying up the edges of our lots or cleaning up where a car or semi had been parked overnight. Even if there was no snow for several days in a row we couldn’t sleep because our days and nights got twisted around.

After going through the cafeteria line to put in my order and pay, I picked a table near the snowplowers hoping to hear about their night. I already knew they weren’t county or city plowers, but I wanted to know if they were they driveway plowers or commercial contractors like we were. Each class of plowers has a different kind of tale to tell. My favorite story is about playing what we called rat hockey. Once in a while a rat would venture out on a parking lot of a large multiplex movie theater where we had just freshly plowed and it was escorted across the lot with two or three trucks chasing him, turning our plows blades back and forth to make the rat fly across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other when it was sliding to flick it again until he was at the edge of the lot and he’d run on top of a snow bank. As far as we could tell no rat ever got hurt but it’s a wonder none of us never collided. But the drivers at the Guy-Land cafeteria were driveway plowers who were more apt to tell stories about half naked woman standing in front of windows without the drapery pulled. 

I just got nicely settled at my table ready to relish the eavesdropping opportunity when the snowplowers left, a huge disappointment. If I was a gutsy person and I’d had more time I might have asked if I could do a ride-along sometime. People asked us that often enough to call it a ‘thing’ and I used to ball my husband out for letting strangers into his truck in the middle of the night. One guy in particular was a frequent ride-a-long. He slept in a dumpster at the movie theater and Don was a sucker for giving him a chance to warm up. Me? There were aspects of plowing that I liked but for the most part I wasn’t a fan of leaving a warm house to go out in the worst weather. Cold. Dark. At times dangerous. And I wouldn’t have worked for anyone else. I got privileges the other plowers never enjoyed. For example, I was never sent to the smaller lots we contracted because I didn’t want to be plowing alone. I stayed on the theater or mall where help was near-by if a hydraulic line broke or the bolts holding the cutting blade snapped. The guys could deal with this stuff but I’d call Don to fix my woes.

I plowed snow for seventeen years and even before that I was a ride-long on nights when they’d been plowing non-stop and Don needed a distraction to help keep him awake. It was on one of those nights when I ended up behind the wheel and I don’t mind saying I was a natural at it. I knew plow patterns and techniques from watching him, of course, but it also takes a certain amount of logic to do commercial lots because the conditions of the snow, the time of the day, the number of cars parked overnight, etc., all factored into to the plow patterns. Don always bragged that I was the best plower he’d ever had and he wasn’t puffing me up. I was good and I’d seen my share of guys who actually caused more work on the lots than they needed to do just by the way they went about things. People are usually surprised when I say I’ve lost my confidence driving in the winter and to that I say, “Give me a heavy pickup truck with a flashing yellow light on top and put me on the road in the middle of the night when few other drivers are out there and I’d get my confidence back.” 

Back in my day of plowing women snow plowers were extremely rare---I may have been the first in the city---and I used to love the expression on people’s faces when I’d climb out of my truck to go inside the Guy-Land Cafeteria with our crew. A woman plower doesn't even turn a head in this century. In 2018 a woman in town even won the annual snowplow rodeo. The crew I saw at the cafeteria? They had one woman and a half dozen guys, just like we had. ©

NOTE: Photo at the top is of Don and me in front of the smallest of three front-end loaders that we used to stack snow on the malls and theater where we plowed. We called them Poppa, Mamma and Baby.