It’s That Virtually Indestructable Mass Of Pack Ice, The Berm

The dreaded word “berm” entered the English language around 1730, a probable variant of “brim.”

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines berm as “a narrow shelf, edge, or path typically at the bottom or top of a slope, or along a bank.” Subsequent definitions include “the shoulder of a road” and “the level space between the edge of a ditch and the bank of earth excavated from it.”

Most dictionaries make little reference to snow, to snowplows or to the way a snow berm can turn otherwise peaceful people into homicidal furies.

In wintry climes, a berm is that loathsome pile left behind by an earnest and hard-working public employee and his or her beloved snowplow. Sometimes it’s a simple little ridge of mushed-up snow, packed, icy and relatively easy to remove. Sometimes it’s an impenetrable, iceberg-like compacted mass, three feet or more tall, equally broad, and having the weight and density of a black hole, the removal of which can best be effected by a few sticks of dynamite or some handy plastic explosive.

Perhaps you have read the humorous, first-person anecdote, circulating in offices and on the Internet, that describes the first winter of a new arrival to snow country. While much of its concluding language is not appropriate for a family newspaper, it takes the anonymous writer from his first snowfall, beneficently gazing at the gently falling flakes, and waving in neighborly joy at the snowplow operator, to a later point at which he’s a frenzied, obscenity-spewing madman, stalking the same operator with an axe.

The particularly harsh late fall that we had this year has introduced me to the darker sides of people I’ve known, people who up until now I thought were jovial, even-keeled and not in the slightest way heading for a listing on “America’s Most Wanted.”

It’s not the snow, slippery ice or arctic cold that sets them off. It’s the berms.

Of all the treacheries of winter, I have seen none that so infuriate newcomers and veterans alike than those intimidating piles of snow and crusty ice. Those masses that seem like boulders dating back to the Earth’s formation magically appear after you’ve cleaned your driveway, walkway and sidewalk. The ones that are ever so much tougher to deal with than is mere snow as it falls the way God intended it to fall.

Few of us own the bulldozer-like equipment that is a match for the task. Most of us have to fend against this contagion with more primitive tools, in an arena where even the back-saving snow blower is quick to jam its tubes with ice.

I have heard that in some communities there are plows with sophisticated, articulated blades that somehow manage to change their angles as they work, leaving higher piles of snow next to the driveways, but leaving the driveways themselves berm-free. What sorts of paradises those places must be, I wonder, and with what luscious civic budgets?

Putting the technical challenges aside, I am interested in how people react to these infernal mounds. There are a few stalwart, resigned souls who just take the mess as it comes, another of life’s recurring challenges, a little aerobic exercise before bedtime, a chance to work off seasonal calories.

And there are families or neighbors who are eager to join together to shovel and sweat, seeing in this sort of cooperative effort an additional chance to share and bond.

There are those who get through the labor by working themselves into murderous rages or Hawaiian fantasies or Zen-like altered states where the mind, mercifully, disconnects from present space and time.

And then there are those who try to ignore berms entirely, blasting through with their cars, if they are lucky, or sinking, trapped, in a morass of slush if they are not.

Doubtless a few hermits decide to tough it out till spring, stockpiling food and supplies well in advance of the drifts.

From a psychological perspective, the challenges of winter in general give us a shared experience that can bring us all closer together because we face a common foe.

The specific case of the berm is more immediate, because if we don’t take some sort of action against it right away, there will be a larger and more menacing one created from it after the next snowfall and the plow’s next pass.

As we labor together in our individual driveways, we can joke and share and come together, and anything ultimately harmless that brings people together in such a harmonious way can’t be all bad.

So we’re all out there, chiseling, hacking, shoveling, whining, cursing, complaining, knowing that the wretched berms will be memories by springtime, and, in a stunning metaphor for our experience on this “mortal coil,” we know that come next winter they will be back. With the snowplows. And the airborne axes.

xxxx