The best laid plans of mice and snow plows . . .

Perhaps it’s a metaphor for life. Or maybe it's nothing more than further proof that this winter has turned out to be a royal pain in the posterior region.

Whenever we get a significant snowfall hereabouts (which seems to be every other day this winter), the city plows not only the roads, but also the public sidewalks on major streets, including the one on which I live. This is a blessing for those of us who walk regularly.

Or it should be.

Thanks to the thaw-and-freeze cycle that occurs with occasionally warm days and consistently cold nights, the sidewalk on my street is an almost solid sheet of ice - some of it rutted, much of it as smooth as if a Zamboni had just passed by on its rounds. As a result, pedestrians routinely walk in the road, figuring it’s easier to dodge traffic than to stay upright on a skating rink. So the sidewalk, free of snow but covered in ice, goes virtually unused.

Sometimes, setting out to do the right thing doesn’t have the desired effect.

Fine Lines: The New York tabloids and Hosni Mubarak

Fine Lines takes a look at headlines from the tabloids. Not the supermarket rags, but real newspapers, such as the Boston Herald and the New York Post, that serve up the news with a touch of brass. A clever or pointed tabloid headline is a thing of beauty (or at least a heck of a lot of fun), especially if it involves wit and wordplay.

The news that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt after three decades on the job sent the New York tabloids into a creative frenzy. While the Daily News settled for a headline that played on Mubarak's name, the Post portrayed the ousted strongman as a mummy.

There are eight million stories in the Naked City . . .

We’ve all seen it a hundred times, on a dozen cop shows. In fact, it’s such a staple that it’s become a cliché. A criminal (murderer, burglar, drug dealer - take your pick) is strolling down a lonely street, seemingly safe from the prying eyes of the law, when a fleet of police cars encircle the bad guy and screech to a halt. The cops get a bead on him from all angles and take him in.

That was me a few days again, playing the role of the scofflaw. Well, not really. But that’s how it seemed at the time.

There I was at 5:15 on a cold, dark morning, huddled on a deserted side street with our chocolate lab Aquinnah as he did his business, when a police cruiser emerged from nowhere, its blue roof lights flashing menacingly. The car pulled to a sudden stop at an intersection about 40 feet from where I was standing, blocking the street I was on. There were no other cars, and no other pedestrians, in sight. Headlights blinded me as I stood frozen in fear (or, as now seems more likely, because of sub-freezing temperatures).

I immediately recalled that a local cop once reprimanded me for failing to pick up after Aquinnah on one of those rare occasions when I forgot to grab a plastic bag on our way out of the house. So my fevered imagination jumped to the conclusion that the police, in a bizarre reordering of priorities, were cracking down on pooping pups and their enabling owners.

Reaching into my coat pocket (“hey, it’s not a gun”), I pulled out a plastic bag and made a big show of pulling it over my hand. When Aquinnah wrapped things up I picked “it” up. We then headed nervously toward the intersection - and the cruiser - on our way back home.

Amazingly, no cop emerged from the car, gun drawn, demanding that I drop the bag of canine contraband and put my hands over my head. Only then did I realize that the cruiser was blocking the intersection so the heavy equipment of public-works crews could lumber up the street on a snow-removal mission.

A run-in with Kojak wasn’t in the cards after all. At least not that day. Who loves, ya, baby?

Yankee ingenuity saves the day

Those six months back in 1981 don’t count. My stint in Washington, D.C., which represents the only time I’ve lived outside of New England, ran from May through October of that year. So I can honestly say that I’ve spent all of my 60 winters in the Northeast, the last two dozen or so here in Maine.

Yet in all that time, I never tried to scare up a rake to clear snow from a roof.

Until yesterday.

Our 140-year-old house, which faces south, has a steep roof and gets enough sun to keep the buildup of snow under control, even this winter. (So far, at least.) The problem is our attached shed out back, on the north side of the house. Thanks to the near blizzards we’ve been getting, seemingly at 24-hour intervals, well over a foot of snow capped the shed’s roof yesterday morning. So I grabbed the phone.

First call: the hardware store around the corner.

"Do you have any roof rakes?"

“We’re all out and nobody else in Augusta has them either.”

Then, a big-box store.

“Sold out. They’re on order, though. Call back on Monday."

Finally, another chain retailer.

“Don’t have any, but we put in an order for two dozen of them. Should have them by the end of next week.”

The end of next week? I might not have a roof left to rake by then.

Immediate action was called for, but with no roof rakes to be had, what was an enterprising homeowner to do?

Improvise.

Scrounging around in the basement, I found a cobweb-covered extension pole that has one of those window-cleaning gizmos on the end of it. It looked pretty flimsy for the job at hand. But short of climbing up on the roof with a shovel, which I had no intention of doing, this seemed like the best option.

Heading outside, I lifted the pole to the roof, settled the squeegee onto the snow, and gave a tentative pull. A mini avalanche followed. This goofy idea actually worked! Within an hour, I’d removed at least half of the white stuff from the roof. The squeegee was shot to hell by then, but replacing it would cost a lot less than rebuilding the shed.

Yankee ingenuity. Sometimes, it's more than a tiresome cliché.

The mysterious ways of network television

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," British author L. P.  Hartley once wrote. That's equally true of the strange world inhabited by network television producers, who sometimes "do things differently" when deciding how to use their limited resources.

When I turned on NBC's TODAY show this morning, for example, one of the program's anchors was based in New York and the other was in Amman, Jordan. Presumably, Lester Holt was in Jordan because of the turmoil in Egypt, even though Amman and Cairo are 307 miles apart, with Israel between them.

That's sort of like covering a breaking news story in New York City from Richmond, Virginia. Amman is closer to Cairo than, say, London is, but once you take that dubious advantage into account, Jordan doesn't offer anything even vaguely resembling a front-row seat to what's going on in Egypt. NBC News has the very able Richard Engel reporting from Cairo, so what did the Jordan-based Holt bring to the table, other than the illusion of proximity to the story?

But hey, the Middle East is the Middle East, right? Arabs are Arabs. Muslims are Muslims. Oppressive heat is oppressive heat. Let's not put too fine a point on things. This is television, after all. Don't set your sights too high.

No fever in this cabin

The concept of cabin fever, like the appeal of Sarah Palin, baffles me. I know it's the norm at this time of year for folks to complain that they are feeling claustrophobic, on edge, stressed out and bored silly because it’s so hard to get out of the house during the winter months. But I just don't get it.

The other day, a Maine woman who used Facebook to organize a snowball fight in a park told a radio interviewer that her only alternative would have been to curl up in a fetal position at home, because reading a good book “only goes so far,” or words to that effect.

Really?

Here in central Maine, it was, for all intents and purposes, impossible to leave the house during Wednesday's snow storm, except for repeated shoveling forays into the yard and driveway and an abbreviated dog walk or two. The exceptions, of course, were those renegade pickup owners who believe sticking plows on their trucks gives them license to careen over hill and dale at life-threatening speeds.

The snow was falling so heavily that hunkering down by a crackling fire with a mug of hot chocolate and a good read was the only sensible thing to do. That strikes me as a much more pleasant prospect that being pelted by ice-studded snowballs in sub-freezing temperatures, and then staggering home in sodden clothing.

But hey, that’s just me. I like the cabin. It doesn’t make me feverish at all. And when I do get the occasional hankering for a change of scenery, the snowshoes are propped up against the wall out in the shed, ready to go. Because when it finally stops snowing and the sun shines yet again, the world is still out there in all its blindingly white glory, even if you can't smell the roses.

Review: "A Rule Against Murder," Louise Penny

 

 

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