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Published: December 22nd 2006
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Denver History Museum
Isn't this an appealing slope? Now imagine it with 2 feet of snow. You get the idea. I love a heavy snowfall. Not just because of the beauty of a thick white blanket, but because all the normal social rules take a holiday. For once, people loosen the buckles of their straitjackets and relate like the loving humans they really are.
Despite the dire warnings issued on the TV news, the two feet of snow that hit Denver this week built more community than a month’s worth of ‘Holiday Festivals.’ It seems that when the mittens go on, the facades come off. Around here, we built community one snowshovel-full at a time.
“Why are you shoveling way up here?” a neighbor named Pete asked me. We were both outside in the midst of the storm, trying to stay ahead of the snowfall. I had already cleared the sidewalks of the two neighbors on each side of our house, including that of the Spanish-speaking meatcutter whose kid’s car stereo often rattles our light fixtures.
“I dunno,” I said, “just because I can.”
“Paying it forward?” he asked.
“Yeah. One day I’ll be old. I hope someone will do it for me,” I said.
Paying it forward was one aspect, but mostly, I like shoveling snow. It reminds me of being a kid when I could earn $20 in a night doing driveways. It was also something I’d never get the chance to do in Shanghai where manual labor is left to an army of workers who do that kind of thing.
I’d met Pete about a year ago, when I was rebuilding Amy’s front porch, fixing the hatchet-job the previous owners performed when they flipped this house for a quick profit. He bought his fixer-upper house on the corner around the time Amy did, doing his part to reclaim this neighborhood from the lowlifes who were exerting their own influence from the broken-down crack-house across the street. America’s real estate boom may have priced most houses out of my reach, but there were still some bargains around here and people like Pete and Amy have upgraded the feel of this area.
As we cleared the first six inches of snow, we caught up about the last year. He told me told me that at his school, there’s now a young Chinese woman on an exchange program, teaching students both Mandarin and Cantonese. Small world, eh?
Once his sidewalk was clear, I walked down the block and joined shovel forces with another guy. Mark is a carpenter, a fellow I met last year when I sought his suggestions on the porch rebuild. He bought another one of the 1890s houses down the street and had shown me around last time. “I’m from Minnesota,” he said, his shovel creating a blizzard of its own. “It helps to get ahead as much as you can.”
Although I’d been gone more than a year, this little snowfall had given us a chance to get reacquainted and over the next day, I saw both of them twice more as we cleared sidewalks and pushed cars out of their wintery graves.
It wasn’t all work though. When Amy declared a snow day from work, we decided to go sledding. But in downtown Denver, there aren’t many hills and the snow left us tied to wherever our feet would take us. We set out for Capitol Hill, figuring if worst came to worst, we could sled the marble staircases. And wherever we went, we traded jokes and observations with all manner of residents, each wrestling with the snow in whatever way they could. With sidewalks impassable, we marched down the middle of busy streets, dragging our sleds, happily sharing the road with whatever trucks were driving by. We dug out a woman who’d high-centered her car coming out of a parking garage. A guy in a Jeep stopped to help us push. No one asked names, we all just worked together.
About a block from the Capitol we spied snowboarders surfing the steps and hand rails, but didn’t see much of a hill to ride. To the right though, we spied a long ramp of snow with a sixty foot vertical drop. I nudged Amy, eyebrows raised.
“Wanna give it a try?”
“We’ll get busted for sure,” she said as we turned.
“Let’s just give it a look...” I suggested.
I’d seen this slope before and had always wanted to climb it, but there are rules about using public buildings as playscapes. Only in the deep snowfall, the rules were suspended, at least that’s what we decided. It helped that we could see faint tracks that someone else had left several hours before. We climbed and quicky reached the top then traversed to the other side of the building, hoping to be less conspicuous.
“How do we know there aren’t more windows?” Amy asked.
“Ya wouldn’t put windows in a roof,” I lied. Still, I dug down to the asphalt roofing, just in case. Then we heard yelling. But it wasn’t the voice of authority and we had to look up to see who it was. Across the street, above us, three people on a parking garage were shouting huzzahs, giving us the thumbs up.
It took a preliminary run to pack the snow enough to actually sled, but in minutes, Amy and I were racing down the ‘hill’ taking care to not roll off the side of the wedge. We went single and double, seated and face first. The three from the parking garage came over and we shared our sleds. Soon a telemark skier came up and cut a beautiful S, opening up a second sled run.
For a while we had Denver’s best sledding all to ourselves. Then a herd of snowboarders arrived. About 15 in all, they’d seen us from the Capitol. The ringleader instructed the others to make a ramp. While we sledded and one boarder surfed off a 12-foot drop, others dug and packed. The key, the bravest boarders knew, would be having enough speed to avoid the window trough but still hit the ramp. The first guy overshot and spent five minutes recovering in a snowbank. The second hit it perfectly. The teleskier aced it. The one woman to try fell short, taking a roof wedge in the chest, but emerging smiling and unscathed. Two couples with saucers landed, taking turns spinning down the slope. Eventually a cameraman from CNN arrived; we’d been overflown by the News 7 helicopter and shooters from both papers had come and gone. In all more than 20 people gathered to play, trading observations, encouraging ideas and pitching in. The cops, bless them, drove by and never said a word. And even the security guy inside the museum kept his distance, watching from the comfort of a warm office.
Amy and I left soon after, she a victim of leaky boots and cold feet, me just old and tired. Walking home we helped dig out yet another truck full of strangers, this time being thanked with multiple ‘gracias.’ Reflecting back, the scenes that had unfolded were created in part because some of us were brave enough to break the rules and because others had generously suspended those same rules. For once, everyone just let people be people, helping with no expectation of reward or fear of criticism. And we agreed the best part was when the three parking garage people had come over and Jason “I’m from the South” took his first ever sled ride. Ollie, the world’s fattest Husky lolled in the snow. His owner was overjoyed. “Thanks for sharing your sleds,” she said. “I was SO wanting to do this today. This is just like the Christmas Miracle.”
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teri
non-member comment
great hearts
Your hearts have wings to match the flying runners of your sleds. Your connection with humor and resilience transformed disaster into community bonding. I am grinning from my core. hugs, teri