Last week, the Boulder City Council passed a more lenient snow-shoveling policy. Before that, residents had only until noon the day after a storm to clear their sidewalks; now they have a full 24 hours after the snow has stopped.
Though such a change should appeal to the laziest of Boulderites, it does fall in line with Denver’s snow-removal policy while giving Boulder’s small code-enforcement squad more time to issue warnings and tickets.
On the surface, timely shoveling seems a somewhat trivial matter, but I’m not so sure it is. There was a time when more things united us with our neighbors. Maybe it was the church a few streets down that many of us attended. Maybe the goings-on of the public school that all the kids in the neighborhood went to.
We still have a handful of things. Tragedies get us out of our wired cocoons and crossing the street to talk to each other — Columbine, Sept. 11, the shootings in Tucson. I’m a smidge sickened, though, by how titillating I find someone else’s tragedy. And the front-page drama of the Broncos still evokes conversation. But for how long, I don’t know, given the shrinking of Sunday afternoons and 4-12 records.
Lucky for us we still have the trivial and profound weather. And when we are lucky, the snow.
A fresh blanket of snow offers a ready-made reason to help your neighbors. Maybe you’re like me: You consider yourself a good neighbor, but you don’t get many opportunities to act like one, especially in winter when people are cozied up inside.
Enter snow. You probably wouldn’t spend 20 minutes helping your neighbor rake leaves, but you just might go over and shovel his short driveway and sidewalk if you know he wouldn’t be able to until he got home from work. And you’d feel really good about yourself afterward.
Snow temporarily changes the rules and removes the awkwardness of us helping each other. Rake someone’s leaves and they might get creeped out or think you’re criticizing them; shovel their driveway, though, and they glow all neighborly the next time they see you — that is, if they even know it was you.
If you want to know how tight a neighborhood is, just walk through one the morning after a good dumping. The snow becomes a temporary canvas that makes visible the neighborliness of a neighborhood.
And it tells you a lot about the people who live there, like who the Major Players are. The MPs generally shovel early and wide and always more than their share. They are the cornerstone houses and they set the tone. There are, of course, the Slackers, the ones who are ever optimistic that even in January the snow will quickly melt only to be seen half-heartedly hacking at the trampled snow/ice mixture that has cemented itself to the sidewalk. Have you ever noticed that these people, even though they live in the neighborhood, aren’t truly a part of it, and that no one goes the extra mile and shovels their walk?
If you think about it, you don’t shovel for yourself. You are not going to biff on your front steps or sidewalk. You shovel for those around you. For the always-in-a-hurry delivery men, for moms pushing strollers, for people late to the bus stop, for basset hounds and other low-rider canines who need a good walk. Your shoveling reflects your ability to think of others besides yourself.
So do Boulderites really need more time to clear their driveways and sidewalks? Of course not, and doing so weakens one of the few connections neighbors have left. But then again (and this may be the real reason for the change), it will give officials more time to enforce the new ordinance and “encourage” Slackers to do what the best of Boulder is doing already.
Daniel Brigham (daniel@danielbrigham.com) is a writer, editor, and instructional designer who lives in Louisville.
