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The Snowblower Chronicles Posting Date: Mar 9 2008 10:21PM Technology is something we humans invented to take the blame for our own shortcomings. As practical and beneficial as our best inventions are, they never do more in the service of humanity than when they sit there silently as we scream, “F*****g dishwasher!”
In blaming the dishwasher for destroying our decorative wooden salad tongs, we absolve ourselves of our guilt and of the responsibility to pay attention to the little warning labels on decorative wooden salad tongs that say, “Not safe for dishwasher.” In staring at our tennis racquets after a missed shot, we convict sporting goods for our lack of talent. In blaming our internet connection for deleting e-mail messages we forgot we read, we throw innocent modems on the live hand grenade of our own irresponsibility and carelessness.
In return for our blame, technology responds with benevolent innocence. Any time our technology has failed us, we had to fail it first. We had to design it imperfectly, construct it haphazardly, manipulate it inexpertly or simply ask it to do something it was not capable of doing, like using a weed-whacker to grout tile.
We blame the internet for sexual predators. We blame television for teenage violence. We blame cell phones for automobile accidents, and we blame weapons of mass destruction for mass destruction.
Well, this just in … it’s us. We’re the perverts, the criminals, the boneheads and the idiots. No iMac, no Sony, no Volkswagen was ever born malicious. Even Fat Man and Little Boy were innocents until Harry Truman gave the order.
There is, however, one exception – the garage door opener. It’s evil. Never, in the history of technology, has there been a more intrinsically vile creation. With heartless abandon, it rips communities asunder. Neighbours who would normally wave hello and exchange pleasantries while fumbling for keys in the driveway or lifting grocery bags from the trunk, now barely nod to each other as their cars pass, then pull swiftly into the snug isolation of their respective garages. It’s gotten to the point where the only way you know your neighbours’ first and last names is if you get their mail by accident.
Damn garage door openers.
But like a white-hatted hero riding into town, there is hope hidden behind the very garage doors that are destroying our communities. There is hope in the humble snowblower.
Nothing – no event, no activity, no monument – brings a neighbourhood together like a snowblower. A man who would never consider lending a hand as you wash your car, weed your garden or mow your lawn, will push his snowbank-chewing Toro across the street with a smile on his face. He may dismiss your labours with a smile and a wave as you take out your trash or shingle your roof, and he might even crack a grin as you chase your recycling down the street like tumbleweeds, but dump ten inches of the white stuff on your driveway and suddenly, you are brothers-in-arms.
And your tiny little driveway isn’t enough. The old couple next door? Blown clean. The family two doors down? Driveway cleared before the father gets home from work. The wanker with the oil-leaking, street-parked junker and the barking dog he keeps out all night? Even he gets the treatment.
There’s magic in a snowblower. It makes a man kind and happy to work. It makes a man a builder of bridges, a uniter of the disenfranchised. The snowblower takes back what the automatic garage door opener takes away … a sense of street, a sense of togetherness. It is a machine of old-fashioned force. It has manly levers, clutches and gears. It is technology, but it is the technology of the Fifties, the decade when we imagine that all neighbours were friends, that all friends were in it together, that fences were for the passing-over of iced teas and potato salad, and that a house was about more than a granite kitchen counter, pot lighting and plasma televisions.
The snowblower is a technology from a time when a house wasn’t a home until it was surrounded on all sides by good neighbours.
The snowblower is the best thing about snow. It’s a miracle of modern technology. |
