// posted February 18, 2007 by Lou Schuler

Normally, I enjoy a good snowstorm. I take freakish pleasure in getting outside and shoveling the front walk and driveway, and if that doesn't feel like a complete workout, I'll tackle the back porch, as well.

But the storm that nailed us on Wednesday was not fun snow. I don't know if there's a name for what came down from the sky -- "wintry mix" sounds too benign, like an iPod shuffle -- but whatever you want to call it, it had the local interstates clusterfucked for a full day:

Vehicles started getting stuck on I-78 around midday Wednesday. But because of what Gov. Ed Rendell called an "almost total breakdown in communication" among state agencies, it took more than a day for state police to close all of the entrance ramps. All motorists had been cleared off the highways by early Friday.


The worst of the problems were on a 50-mile stretch of I-78 in eastern Pennsylvania, where National Guardsmen in Humvees ferried food, fuel and baby supplies to the stranded drivers.

This was my neighborhood; the eastern end of the freeway ice capades was just a couple miles from my house.

When I got out on Thursday to shovel, it was absolutely miserable work. It looked like snow, but because of the layers of sleet, it was several times as heavy. I'd bought a new snow shovel in January, thinking I was clever for doing this before there was snow on the ground, but the damned thing worked too well. It has a bigger scoop than my old one, and picked up too much of the crap at once. I was winded long before I got to the bottom of the driveway, which is the hardest part, where the snow gets heavier and deeper, and where the local snowplows tend to create even bigger piles to move.

But it all had a good ending. It was warmer yesterday, and I decided to tackle the rutted ice on part of the street just outside our driveway. (We live on a cul de sac, so when I saw "street," I'm talking about an area the size of a couple basketball courts.) Our cars had been sliding around and wheel-spinning on the part at the bottom of our driveway, so I figured that was the best chance I'd get to give us a little safety zone before something bad happened.

I soon discovered that, with some effort, I was able to break up the ice into large, six-inch-thick slabs, which were curiously fun to lift and throw into piles. Two of my kids were home (my older daughter, ironically enough, was at her weekly ice-skating lesson), and they were so entertained by my feats of strength that they got out and helped me. Soon they were challenging themselves to haul and throw ever-bigger ice slabs.

The work then evolved into a geography lesson, with my 11-year-old son debating with me whether this slab looked more like South America and Africa. Soon we were deliberately creating chunks to look like individual states. (Swear to God, I got one of mine shaped just like Oklahoma.)

A neighbor kid came over with his snowboard -- we have a small but steep hill in your backyard, which is popular with kids old enough to steer around the massive oak tree at the base -- and soon he was helping us break up and haul blocks of road ice. For a few minutes there, you would've thought the ice in our street was Tom Sawyer's fence.

It didn't last long; the neighbor kid got bored with the manual labor, and talked my son and younger daughter into sliding down the hill. But they had so much fun that they stayed out there all afternoon. Altogether, my two kids were outside working or playing at least four hours. I'd guess that they got more exercise on Saturday than they'd gotten the previous five or six days combined.

The secret to getting kids to do exercise without being told?


1. Novelty

2. Entertainment (Dad lifting big things that looked heavier than they were)

3. Physical challenge (lifting bigger things than they'd thought they could lift)

4. Choice (I wasn't making them help me, and they got to go off and play when they got bored)

5. Intellectual stimulation (for nerds like me and my son, at least)


Is it really any more complicated than that?


Come blow your snow


Speaking of novelty, the New York Times has a story this morning about people who want to make their own:

Those who make snow are proud of their powder. They speak passionately about its stacking qualities (it is denser than snow that starts out in a cloud) and bandy about terms like nucleation and wet bulb temperature. Forums like snowguns.com, which has over 3,700 members, show a subculture as much into the process of snowmaking as the result of it. There are discussions about how to build your own rope tow and lengthy back-and-forths about the attributes of various snow wand nozzles.


Still, size matters to a snowmaker. Mr. Young dreams of a "bigger vertical," he said. "Everyone who makes snow wants a larger hill."


Mr. Heaven dreams of a commercial machine, an 18-nozzle gun that would make a hill like his in an hour, he said. "It's a serious commitment," he said, and it would require a concrete platform to mount the thing, which costs about $30,000. "It's a whole different story," he said, indicating that his wife was not yet on board with a system upgrade.

Tags: exercise