An elderly black woman berates the mayor on television. Snow continues to fall around them, the squawk and flash of emergency vehicles filling the space that remains. The Blitz is on to clear the city in the aftermath of the fourth worst snowstorm to ever hit the region. Still, the villagers are angry.
Their cars remain cocooned along streets days after the storm first hit, crusted by the heavy, dirtied wake of the plow. Paths cleared on the sidewalk are barely passable. The schools are still out and businesses suffer, save the purveyors of parkas and teenagers with shovels. Someone must be to blame.
So the mayor is compelled to slip on his boots and hit the streets. Flanked by a news crew, he oversees the progress of Caterpillars and salt trucks digging out embattled Hazlewood. He even gives the project a name our tribe can understand.
The old woman is a community organizer with large, unstylish glasses frames. She hollers and gesticulates at the mayor, pointing accusingly. He attempts to disappear within his puffy winter coat and beneath the flat brim of his black ball cap, pulled down nearly to his eyes. But to no avail.
The mayor pleads for the woman’s understanding, as the entire city is under duress.
She has none of it.
“Here first,” she corrects, demands. “Always here first.”
And she is doing the right thing. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and the airtime. The residents are lucky to have an apparatus, a civic oil can on and about which to depend and grumble, respectively.
Granted, those populating the country do have the township to assist them. The supervisor mans the plow truck to carve the long and winding back roads. But when it comes down to it, it requires a measure of self-determination to burrow out in of the backwoods. One must nurture alliances with those who have access to the necessary equipment—a steady pickup or four wheeler, a plow, and general friendliness.
All throughout the counties, truck engines are failing due to overuse and abuse. Some industrious amateur plowmen are even falling victim themselves to treacherous curves and snow covered embankments, relying on still more and friendlier acquaintances for their own rescue.
Everyone has their limitations.
But equally long and winding driveways must be gutted of their accumulation, by plow or shovel or waiting on the sun to arrive and prove its usefulness, watching the sky from the front window with beer in hand.
In the country, no one will respond to complaints lodged to little more than the air. It’s only the cries of the screech owl or the sudden explosion of a frozen tree that is returned from the opaque whiteness. It is an admonition.
“Shut up with your smallness,” it says. “Dig.”
So they dig in the country, as we do in the city—the drunks, the widows, and the weak at heart alike. But out in the sticks, the only ones they curse are themselves, for the reluctance of the fireside and the front window and a bit of bad luck. And sometimes the President, because it is the fashion of the day. And also the sky, with fist upturned and profanities lofted. Although that will very rarely get anyone on television.