The Sisyphean Assignment of Shoveling Incessant Snow

"Know your role and shut your mouth." This is the lesson that the figure of Sisyphus personifies within Greek mythology. The proud king/founder of Corinth, Sisyphus achieved his high earthly status through his great skills of craftiness and trickery. So great was his hubris that this mortal monarch began to think of himself as possessing stature and nobility which approached divinity. Behaving as though he were a peer to the gods, Sisyphus overstepped his bounds as a human being when he (among other things) volunteered information on Zeus' sexual escapades to another deity.

His punishment? Zeus condemned Sisyphus to spend eternity in the Underworld performing a most ungratifying sort of labor. Sisyphus had to roll a massive rock to the top of a steep hill. But every time he would near the apex, the rock would escape his grasp and return to the base. Thus Sisyphus would forever be humbled by this difficult and fruitless task.

I've recently received a tiny taste of the Sisyphean experience. As many of you already know, Indiana has been receiving a large amount of winter precipitation during the last 24 hours. Now the total accumulation of snow and sleet is nowhere near what folks in Denver and Buffalo have been dealing with recently, but it has been enough to close down the schools and leave me more or less trapped in my house.

Now when weather like this sets in around the homestead, the task usually falls to Dave Scott to shovel all this accumulated precipitation off of the driveway. I don't mind the chore really. After all, I am the strongest, able-bodied person in our immediate family. And, at the present time, performing this service is a good way for me to demonstrate my gratitude to my aunt and uncle for letting me live here rent free for the past 8 months. It's also the closest thing to cardiovascular exercise my big ass is willing to engage in these days.

Of course, weather forecasts are always changing and reports vary from one meteorologist to another. But the consensus as I understand it is that Indianapolis will have received 11 or more inches of materials from the sky by the time this winter storm has finished bombarding our collective ass. The kicker is that the precipitation is accumulating relatively slowly over a 36-48 hour period.

The first major wave of snow hit last night while most folks were asleep. Not at all keen on the idea of shoveling snow that's sleet-encrusted and piled a foot high, I decided to head outside at 9am and clear away the 4"-5" that was already there this morning. I'm proud to say that I was able to shovel the entire driveway (as well as the sidewalk that leads to our front door) in a little over an hour. That pride was quickly squashed. By 4pm, nearly all the space I cleared out was filled back in with sleet and snow. Tomorrow morning I will have to head out again and relocate even more material than I tossed around the first time.

During several brief moments of self-pity, I amused myself with the thought that the God of Abraham was playing the role of Zeus to my Sisyphus. Instead of rolling a bolder to a hilltop, my incompletable task is to clear off a drive way that will be continuously rained, snowed, and sleeted upon. In my book, either punishment is far better than the one given to Prometheus for sharing fire with humanity: being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten out by birds every day.

I had a foretaste of this experience last week when 4" of powdery snow greeted me at 3pm when I returned home from work. After I cleared off the last corner of the driveway, I turned around to see that another inch-and-a-half had built up where I had just shoveled less than 60 minutes earlier. Therefore, I had to shovel my entire drive way two consecutive times before I could consider my task completed.

Here's hoping tomorrow's stage of my ongoing shoveling duties isn't too exhausting. In the final analysis, I'm not complaining about my Sisyphean challenge. Just reporting the details.