You know you live in the mountains when your alarm clock is a snowplow.

Every winter morning between 5 and 5:30 I am awakened by the sound of metal scraping on icy roads. Then like a snooze alarm 10 minutes later the sound returns as the plow makes its way the other direction on the road, after turning around at road’s end a mile from our house.

I live a quarter mile off the main road, but in our little slice of mountain valley the sound vibrates.  Sounds that in the city you wouldn’t hear if they were happening next door are exasperated here by the resonance of the valley and silence surrounding it.  I swear sound here travels further and faster than the ‘L’ train in Chicago. You can hear the kids playing touch football a half mile away. If a neighbor has an outdoor party they tell everyone to drop in for a cold one, since we are going to hear every word said anyway.

But, unlike when I lived in the city, where the next door neighbors could be heard arguing with their teenager over lost driving privileges…not once here have I heard anyone arguing.  We may be a goofy bunch of remote, high mountain dwellers, but we are a ridiculously happy bunch.  Could be the party pub in my neighbor’s garage creating our euphoric lifestyles, or maybe we’re all crazy and heavily medicated. Either way, even the early wake-up call of the snowplow makes us all happy.

Without it, we’d never get to work or play on time.  The two miles downhill from home, affectionately called The Luge Run would pitch more of us in the ditch without the sand the plow flings on its merry way. We’d never by able to tow trailers loaded with snow machines to the forest without neatly plowed roads. The snow banks created by daily plowing are like gutter rails in bowling alleys for little kids, allowing our trucks to bounce off them and continue on our way. Talk at the party pub after work always drifts to who spent time in a ditch, and who else bounced off snow banks, and how many times in one trip.

Directions to our houses are given by the trees, corners or ditches named after you from either sliding into the them, or as in my case scraping the guardrail all the way down “Lyn’s hill.” George holds the party pub record for most times in one season getting stuck in your own driveway. (After achieving this “award” every year for several years, he hired the awesome guy who plows our little valley’s private roads to also plow our driveway.  He now hasn’t been stuck in our drive since the 2013 slide-into-the-woodpile event.)

In Wyoming, plow drivers are revered as godlike if they are good ones. For a couple years we threatened to dump our driver in a snow bank, as he would plow the ditch, not the road. If you didn’t know exactly where the road was, you would happily drive along his plowed path and drop right into the ditch. In Wyoming the government doesn’t believe in snow poles to mark County roads to assist the driver unless said road is lived on by someone famous or very rich. Basically, our plow drivers are plowing using The Force.

I’m also pretty sure one year the driver spent his afternoons at the bar instead of making a second pass plowing slush off the road. I don’t really blame him, as without snow poles to find his way in the morning darkness, I’m sure he shit his pants a few times because of sheer fear.

It’s a thankless job at best. At worst, one where people daily call your boss to complain if they don’t like “your work.” I can’t imagine working with that kind of stress.  Which may be why every year we have a new driver on our plow route. Actually, I think we have a new driver every year, because after the heart-stopping fear of being the first on this road every morning for five to six months, I’d move to a beach, where the only white stuff I see would be the sand.

So to all you snow plow drivers out there who wake me at 5 a.m. I say thank you, and stop by anytime for a beer. I love you guys!