JACKSON, WY — With a new sprinkle of snow on the ground this morning, it feels like winter may never end. And perhaps knows this better than the winter street operators who have given countless, thankless hours managing the snow.
Members of Jackson’s Public Works Department and Wyoming Department of Transportation accepted Rotary’s “Citizen of the Month” award at yesterday’s Rotary Lunch Club. The honor recognizes their “consistently tremendous service to our community, including during the record-setting snow month of February 2019,” Town of Jackson wrote on Facebook.
We could write an ode to Jackson’s hard workers, Wilson resident Len Carlman already did. What a perfect way to thank our “plow guys.”
Plow Guys
by Len Carlman
Watching the skies day and night, ready to harvest every new crop, they’re the farmers of the snow. Watching jet streams, Pacific fronts, low pressure zones and radar screens with the insight of meteorolgists, they’re the plow guys.
When Glory Bowl lets loose its load and buries Highway 22 in tons of energized snow that sets up like cement, we know who grinds the big spinning blades into the wall – they’re the plow guys.
When the storm system comes in waves that run for a week or more straight, burying the valley day after day, the coffee pots are busy and the Red Bull supply dwindles. The plow guys keep on pushing.
In the lonely dead of night, after the snow has stopped falling, when the skies have cleared, the moon reflects so much light off the snow that headlights are optional. In the wide open expanses of highway 89 through the National Park and up Togwotee Pass, soaking up beauty that would stop a poet’s heart, slowing to a crawl to steer clear of a road-trapped moose, they’re the plow guys.
When the high pressure systems have a three-week hold on the valley, the streets are all clear, and the snowpack is stable and settling, they’re there at the ready, tending to equipment, getting the bills out, managing the cash flow, ready to go.
Some drive beasts. Loaded tandem axle rigs that run to 60,000 pounds with engines that reach, 225, 350, even 450 horse power. Charging up the ten percent grade on Teton Pass and down the Snake River Canyon managing all that beastly weight against gravity, finding the edge of the road, looking through blinding snow for each roadside reflector, one by one, they’re the plow guys.
They drive old pick ups with rusted blades and hydraulic systems that somehow manage to work, storm after storm, year after year. Other times they drive fickle machines, ready to break down 24/7, grinding through transmissions, shearing bolts, blowing hoses, clearing more pennies from their owners’ bank accounts than flakes of snow from roads. In the seat of every one sits a plow guy.
Some drive huge bucket machines designed for dirt, with lifting strength that would make an Egyptian pyramid builder weep. Bouncing along major roadways between jobs, cruising at 20 miles per hour, ready to open up the next street, the next parking lot, the next driveway, they’re the plow guys.
Who are those big operators in the boxes, in those Mini machines, those tiny freezing enclosures built for sidewalks and trim work, plotting against the limits of the machine, the tight spaces, the fully occupied snow storage sites? They’re the plow guys too.
Once in a while there’s a parked car exactly where it’s not supposed to be. Momentarily scheming to shove it up, up and away, or maybe just take off the sideview mirror, and then they don’t, and aren’t we glad for the forbearance of the plow guys?
In the midst of yet another winter storm cycle that would paralyze any city in the United States, we keep on trucking, we move about with ease, we get out of our driveways, down our streets, into our parking lots, on with our lives. Who do we have to thank for that? The plow guys.
© 2019 Len Carlman, Wilson, Wyoming
