The Parable of the Shuffle-Plow

Logistics and Wagers at the End of the World

The afternoon before, the snow had been a foot deep on the spur road, and a lot of that had gotten mashed down by driving and walking—no real danger of getting stuck if you remembered your tire chains.

But overnight the storm rolled in, according to the locals it was the biggest single-storm snow dump in the past fifty years.

By the morning, the half-mile track to the main road was buried in more than two feet of the white stuff—charming, if it didn’t mean we were well and truly snowed in. Nothing urgent. The pantry was well-provisioned with food preserved and stockpiled over the past two years in anticipation of this first winter on bare land.

A good thing too. I didn’t have any other way out—which is why I’d parked my car on the road that the city plowed.

But that road was a half-mile away.

A half mile of knee-deep snow stood between me and clear road.

A half-mile that I was solely responsible for, because I was the only person who ever used it.

A half mile of shoveling between me and the car I’d parked on the shoulder.

Shoveling.

Or shuffling.

I had previously picked up a nifty little tool for maintaining paths on the ranch after I saw some shopkeepers in town using them. A little, single-person snow scoop that worked like the unholy love child of a snow plow and a tractor bucket.

It took a couple weeks of work, doing four hours a day every other day (days in between were rest for my tired arms and legs), and cursing my life all the while, but I got the thing cleared.

Snow Removal for Dummies

If you don’t live in snow country, you might not know what a big pain in the ass this fluffy flavor of rain can be. It’s gritty like sand, slick like ice, bloody gorgeous, and it bounces the sunlight up at you from below giving you a worse sunburn that a day sunbathing nude on an Italian beach. When you get trapped by it, you’ve got a few options:

• Walk through it

• Ski or snowshoe through it

• Snowmobile through it

• Ride a horse through it

• Shovel it

• Plow it

• Scoop it (with a tractor bucket or something similar)

• Blow it

Or you can make sure you’re provisioned for the winter and just ignore it until the bears wake up.

When you live in an extreme environment, you learn to have multiple backup plans, because you will need them. Just as with military logistics, film-making, farming, or any other endeavor with a lot of points of failure.

Types of Decision Environments

Extreme environments are ones where human trust is not a given, and, even when it exists, is not the most important factor in the system. Your level of trust does nothing to change the weather, or change the course of an enemy missile, or charm a charging wolf like Bugs Bunny in drag. Such things have their own agendas, and you are merely a bit of grit in their system (if that). No matter how regularized the environment’s behavior, it’s likely to reach out and smack you when you least expect it.

Extreme environments are normal.

“Normal” environments, on the other hand, are ones we’ve invented. They are the “walled garden” of domestication when compared to the jungle of what’s actually normal (or, as we like to call it, “extreme”). These domesticated environments—cities, offices, public parks, bureaucracies, machines, and average year-round subtropical weather (which, I grant you, we didn’t invent)—are reliable, and reliability is what we humans like.

When you’re working in the midst of a dead-reliable system, your best approach is to so-arrange your operations that you only have to worry about a single point (or single type) of failure, and then put all your energies into preventing that failure.

When you’re working in an unreliable system, on the other hand, you want to go the other way: you know you can’t prevent failure, so you must instead design for success (as defined by some articulated goal). To do this, ironically, you must create as many minor and different points of failure as possible, and arrange them so that the kind of bad luck it would take to make them all fail is the kind of luck that means you’re unlikely to be alive to need them working anyway. Your system can thus absorb the shocks of fate like the crumple zones in your car can absorb telephone polls.

Weathering Shocks to the System

Think about what we all got reminded of (or learned for the first time) during Covid:

Your life has a single point-of-failure: reliable international shipping. Without it, you have no fuel, no goods on your store shelves, no electronics, and maybe no civic order. If that system breaks down long enough, you won’t just run out of food and toilet paper and medicine, you’ll lose power and run out of water—the power grid and the water system aren’t static things, after all; they are, themselves, systems that must be continually maintained and upgraded.

But the people that did well in Covid were those who are so provisioned that they could sustain losing access to food, access to fuel, access to transit, access to water, and access to power (though thankfully these latter two didn’t really come into play in most places) for extended periods of time. Maybe they were backpackers and so had camping supplies and know-how. Perhaps they’d stockpiled their own food, or had chickens in the yard or gardens to help stretch their food supplies. Perhaps they had a well. Maybe they had tools and could build-instead-of-buy the wagon or trailer they suddenly needed, or could fabricate emergency replacement parts for their vehicles so that they could stay on the road while they waited for the auto parts store to get things back in stock.

In my case, I had several snow removal options. Unfortunately, my snow plow was out of commission that year. My snowblower was in the shop and so couldn’t be delivered to the home site (given the wall of snow that took up the road). My local back-up snow-plow-guy-for-hire was so busy that his truck broke down from over-use, so all I had were my shovels and my little shuffle-plow.

But I did have my shuffle-plow. And getting out was truly optional, not mandatory—and I had other ways out if I really needed them (i.e. sleds and feet).

I put it off for a few weeks, but eventually I broke down. for two weeks I spent my days cursing the poor timing and my undeliverable snowblower while I pushed, walked, lifted, scooped, and built carve-outs in the high banks on either side of the road that I could then use as a ramp to dump scoops full of snow.

And, when I had a day of work left, the plow guy got his truck fixed, so I didn’t have to do the steepest part of that long hill.

When I was done, I had a gloriously clear road, and no more snows too-big-to-handle troubled me that winter. I got my ducks in order so that should such a thing happen two years in a row, I’d be ready.

Unintended Solutions

That next winter, though, I found something odd.

I kept using that damn little shuffle-plow. The world’s second least efficient method of snow removal (well, third if you count having your dog eat it), and I kept using it to keep that goddamn road clear. A half-mile of private road (which included a hell of a steep hill a quarter-mile long), plowed with a shuffle-plow.

When it was time to go do snow removal, I had cabin fever from the unusually dark and cloudy winter.

Every time I went out, I didn’t want to listen to loud engines beating my ears.

Every time I went out, I wanted some damn exercise.

And so my expensive equipment mostly stayed silent.

And I kept shuffling.

And scooping.

And lifting.

And dumping.

And loving every minute of it.

And on those rare occasions it got to be too much to handle, or when I was too busy...

...well, that’s why you have multiple levels of redundancy spread over multiple points of failure, isn’t it?