2.2.05

In my last entry I was appealing to a higher power to let me in on the big plan for my life. While I haven’t seen any burning bushes or knocked on the doorway to Valhalla, I have had what some might call a moment of clarity. (In a side note, I did find Nirvana; it was on sale for $7.99 at our local Virgin Megastore.)

Recently, the skies over O’Fallon opened up and these little white flakes - which I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure no two were exactly alike - began falling to the ground. When this happens, the first thing I do is offer God some Head and Shoulders, but the second thing I do is reach for my ringing cell phone. See, because I’m a male, hourly employee of the City, I am required to plow snow. And on this particular evening at 9:30, I got the call to come in and fight the flakes.

I arrived at the Streets Department shed and was assigned Truck #5, a big diesel rig made specifically for plowing the white stuff: the plow was attached on the front while still at the factory, there is no truck bed other than a large, funnel-shaped container with a small conveyor belt at the bottom to transport road salt to the spinning spreader sticking off the back-end of the truck. Normally I drive a vehicle that is little more than a Dodge Ram you can buy from your local dealer with a plow duct taped to the front bumper and a large colander in the bed to store road salt. Needless to say, Truck 5 was a little bit of an adjustment for me.

I began driving out to my route - Route 6 - which covers mainly the Hutchings Farm subdivision, over to the Calumet Ranch subdivision, and ending on Knaust Road (For those of you who speak proper English, rather than whatever it is spoken here in Missouri, that’s pronounced “Ka-Nowst” for some odd reason), which marks the easternmost border of our city limits. At first we were only spreading salt on the roads as the snow wasn’t coming down that hard. At 10:30 I had a feeling I’d be home by midnight. Ah, how naïve I was.

By midnight, the snow was coming down in flakes the size of Datsuns. Well, ok, maybe they were closer to a Miata, but they were still big. But then, just as magically as these floating monstrosities appeared, they’d be gone again. It snowed in spurts like this for a while and I was told to stick mainly to the “arterial” roads until it stopped for good. In snowplow driver lingo, arterial roads are to rivers as side streets are to tributaries. If you didn’t do too well on this portion of the SAT, just know that arterials are the major roads. On my route, the arterial roads are Knaust and Laura Hill Road (which is pronounced “Law-ra Hill Rode”). So, for about the next six hours I drove up and down Laura Hill Road and Knaust, sometimes with my plow down, sometimes just spreading salt, sometimes I’d do a combination of the two at the team leader’s request. For the most part I was asking myself, “Why are we still out here?” However, just as I’d get the last syllable out, those big flakes would start to fall once again and I’d have to actually put my plow down on the pavement. The entire night was a series of ups and downs like this.

There was one point in the evening when my big Truck #5 was running low on petrol, as the Brits say. So I headed back to the shed and pulled up next to the diesel tank. It was bloody hot inside the cab of Truck #5, because if I didn’t have the defrost cranked high enough my windows would start to fog over. As I descended from the cab, rappelling with the mountain climbing gear I was given earlier in the evening, I slid on my well-insulated, neon green, safety coat.

You should see this coat! It is the most unnatural shade of green you’ll ever see. I think it was created in the 1950’s at a secret bunker in Arizona where hundreds of scientists worked tirelessly in a lab, bent over beakers and tubes and Bunsen burners, firing massive amounts of radiation at winter coats in order to create a garment impervious to Russkie nuclear fallout while fighting a ground war in Siberia. That can be the only explanation for this color green because this thing is so atomically bright that I think I’m now sterile after wearing it. Maybe that’s for the best, really.

Anyway, from the pockets of my physics-defying coat, I pulled a pair of stained leather gloves that the City purchased for me earlier this year and put them onto my cold little hands. I flipped the switch to turn on the gas tank, pulled the nozzle from its cradle, unscrewed the cap on my truck, and began filling.

The mechanics of the tank whined, blocking out virtually all sound except for the grinding of the backhoe filling up someone’s truck with salt over by the shed. Amidst all this hum I looked up into the sky. The snow was taking one of its breaks at the moment and the sky was black and reflective like a chunk of obsidian. The stars were beautiful, looking like the bulbs in God’s Bright Light. Sadly, though, these lights were not in the shape of a train engine.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, I began laughing.

This wasn’t a little giggle to myself, mind you. This was a full-on, lost a screw, bring the straightjacket, belly laugh. Thankfully the machinery was so deafening that no one heard me or else right now I’d probably be finding out how well my health insurance covers electroshock therapy. I laughed for a good thirty seconds before letting it dwindle to little more than a smile and somewhat relieved, satisfied look on my face. I was laughing because I had to. I was laughing because if I didn’t, I think I would have broken down and cried.

Before I began laughing I had asked myself…as I was fueling up a snow plow at 5:00AM…“How in the hell did I get here?” I laughed because I realized that this is all just one big practical joke.

There is no plan for our lives whatsoever. All there is is one more whoopee cushion, one more squirting flower, and one more pile of fake barf laid down by the hand that created all this. As a person, all we can do is try to avoid the prankster and his bucket of water precariously balanced above the doorway.

However, the ultimate trick on us is that there is no way to avoid His stunts. We are hapless victims who will slip on the banana peel every time. We always eat the garlic-flavored gum. We always look through the telescope towards the horizon and wind up with a black ring around our eye. Like Martin to Lewis, like Abbott to Costello, like Cheney to Bush, we are God’s straight-man: always the butt of the jokes, always the one that looks like a fool when he gets a cream pie shoved in his face by the idiot jester that everyone in the crowd loves.

Once you’ve accepted your role in this comedic duo, there are only two things you can do. You can get really pissed off and strangle yourself with a rubber chicken after one too many anvils is dropped on your head. Or you can learn to laugh at yourself and your rather silly situation. That night at 5:00AM I didn’t have a rubber chicken handy, so I decided to give the second option a try for a while.

A friend pointed out to me something John Lennon once said: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”. That mop head was one smart feller. Lord knows I didn’t plan on being awake at 5:00AM scraping snowflakes the size of convertibles off the streets of a city I didn’t even know existed five years ago in a state I’d only visited a few times in the twenty-five years prior to my moving here, but that was where I was last Friday. Who knows where I’ll be in five more years.

Here’s hoping I’ll still be laughing then.

Space Monkey X