Roughly speaking, the irony of snow removal is that snow removes itself. It sublimates into ice, melts into water, evaporates into vapor. In most places where it’s removed, snow has a maximum lifespan of a few days to a few months. But during those scattered winter weeks, we spend millions of dollars shoveling, plowing, blowing, and hauling it away in order to pretend it’s a different season. Like football season, for instance. Now that the Metrodome's roof has collapsed (following attempts to melt snow off the roof with hot water), the University of Minnesota is shoveling out "the Bank" so that the Vikings can host the Chicago Bears on Monday night. To accomplish this pharaonic undertaking, the U has employed gangs of 100 laborers rotating in 4-hour shifts, shoveling snow 16 hours a day until the field's playing area, seats, and corridors are cleared (UPDATE: They are now asking for additional volunteers!). When they're done, they should flood the stadium and stage a naval battle.

It's hard to do certain things well in the snow, and in the past people have adapted. Today, however, we expect winter to conform to our standards of "livability," a vague idea that what's good for somebody is good for everybody. By removing snow, I guess we think that we are making our cities and highways more "livable." In addition to making us late for work, snow slows down the distribution of goods and services; snow accumulation impedes our accumulations as consumers. Whether we're after live football or leafy greens, there are certain things that Minnesotans aren't meant to have in the middle of December. But because we think we need them, or maybe that we've earned them, or that we should have access to them in a "livable" city, we remove snow as soon as possible, even though it’s an expensive process measured by the core values of American social life: time, money, and inconvenience.

The history of snow removal is instructive because it demonstrates how these values have grown so bizarrely unhinged from the seasonal rhythms in which Americans and others have lived for centuries. But that’s not really my point. It would be too easy to argue that the needs of the marketplace have trumped our “natural” relationship with winter. Instead, let’s think about it like this: there’s no such thing as an authentic approach to winter, you just kind of stammer along with its pains and pleasures. Living with winter is part triage, part bricolàge. Not surprisingly, then, some of the most important factors in the history of snow removal have been peoples’ objections to the removal of snow.

Up until about a hundred years ago, snow made it easier, not harder, to get around. When the first snow of the season cemented the city’s rough, rutted roads into smooth corridors, drivers replaced the wheels of their wagons with skis and runners. Outside of town, snow also eased cross-country travel. In the early 1850s, travel to St. Paul was best accomplished by sleigh during the dead of winter, a fact understood by most travelers. John Owens, the editor of the Weekly Minnesotian, emphasized this point in his stilted remarks on winter travel: “the man who desires to go to Minnesota in the winter season, and deters for fear of difficulties and sufferings on the road is a great dunce.” Yes, indeed, sliding over snow is generally easier than rolling over rocks, mud, logs, and the other sorts of obstacles that adorned the nineteenth-century highway.

Beyond offering an effective mode of transportation, sleighs also provided winter revelers with a splendid opportunity to get corned. Rather than sitting indoors, huddled beneath snuggies, our stolid Victorian ancestors used winter as an excuse to party. For as long as the snow lubricated access between friends’ farms and villages, people sleighed across field and forest to greet and gift one another, drinking brandy, rum and other spirits. Sometimes their inebriation contributed to horrific sleigh accidents. Other times, their sleigh-abrations endured grisly wolf attacks.

For the sleigh industry, snow removal was a bitch. But historians of the sleigh have mostly ignored the impact of snow removal on the sleigh’s obsolescence, instead, blaming the internal combustion engine. Erika Janik, for instance, writes that the sleigh, “like the horse-drawn-wheeled carriage… began to disappear with the spread of automobile travel.” But she also notes that in Wisconsin sleighs lasted longer on public roadways than did wheeled carriages, sharing the road with automobiles at least until the 1940s. It seems the reason sleighs didn’t outlive the mid-twentieth century wasn’t because they didn’t have engines, but because by the 1940s we had started plowing snow off public thoroughfares.

And, of course, today there are engines on sleighs; they’re called “snow machines,” “snowmobiles,” or simply “sleds.” The correct pronunciation depends on your provincial dialect, your body mass index, and your opinion of Todd Palin. The reason most of us don’t drive these around town or down the highway in the winter isn’t because they’re obnoxiously loud or they make you smell like lawn mower exhaust, but because snow removal eliminates the option. Granted, snowmobiles remain an important form of transportation in seriously isolated Arctic and mountain locations. But for most people, they’re solely a mode of recreation—you have to actually load them into your truck and drive somewhere to use them.

The tragedy of snow removal really sinks in when you realize how it’s transformed skiing. People used to ski to get around, but now, because of snow removal, people can only ski for fun. Like snowmobiling, skiing is mostly recreation, not transportation. Although the Norwegians are typically, and perhaps rightfully associated as the vanguard of skiing peoples, I think it was the Finns that best utilized skiing as transportation when they fought off a Soviet mechanized invasion in 1940, skiing around and blowing up Red Army tanks. Just think how the Battle of the Bulge might have turned out differently had Patton’s army double-poled its way to Bastogne, rather than sat in snowbound columns of deuce-and-a-half trucks. Today, not only do people mostly have to drive to go skiing, but if they’re “alpine skiing” they need to take motorized lifts to the top of the mountain. When I was in high school, Mount Baker set the world record for one-year snowfall, reporting 1,140 inches. I remember they had to shovel out the ski lifts in order to keep them running. All this snow made for awesome skiing, but it also demonstrated the sweet perversion of ski resort alpinism. I mean, since when did you need to remove snow so that you could ski on it? I thought about that a little longer and realized, lifts aside, that the only reason I could ever ski Baker was because the Washington DOT plowed Highway 542.

Last weekend’s “snOMG” event dropped it deep enough and fast enough that I could actually ski around on Minneapolis city streets before they got plowed. But only after merrily skiing circles along West River Parkway did I realize this was a golden opportunity to use skis for their original intended purpose—going somewhere. Determined to reenact the folkways of a bygone era (the Victorian winter spree), I pointed my ski tips toward the liquor store, kicking and poling my way toward its stockpile of libatious elixirs. To my fascination, I encountered at least half-a- dozen other skiers headed the same direction; even an older couple freighting home a case of beer on a dog-drawn toboggan. I glided along the tire-groomed streets as dusk settled across the plastered landscape, proffering my half-hearted words of encouragement to the frantic motorists digging their cars out of the buried curb lanes. “Need a hand?” I would ask, skiing out of earshot before they had a chance to express anything other than dumbfounded shock.

This was an unfamiliar winter moment—skiing somewhere rather than going somewhere to ski. The incongruity revealed the possibility of a different world, a world without snow removal, but otherwise a world not far from our own.

The difference, I think, lies primarily in our imaginative capabilities. Over the last century, the history of snow removal has corresponded with broader social desires to stabilize global exchange. As the twentieth-century wore on, snow removal offered a technological fix to the problems winter posed to the industrial city’s conformation to modern standards of transportation and distribution, a model defined more by L.A. than by London. Opening the city to these international standards required the constant management of local environments. In our own neo-liberal era, formerly corporate concerns over the conformation of urban infrastructure to these global norms have infiltrated the lives of individual citizens, who, now expressing their liberty through markets and property, imagine themselves as products rather than persons. Snowy roads slow their distribution to consumers, who expect that these human products come packaged and delivered via acceptable standards of global ground freight: cars, buses, bikes. That it’s ridiculous to imagine a modified public snow coach transporting people down Hennepin Avenue indicates how a global sense of place has limited our creativity. And yet, after tonight’s cessation of Minneapolis’s back-to-back Snow Emergencies, few will question the sanity of removing 17 inches of snow from over 3,000 miles of streets and alleys, enough to “plow a path from Minneapolis to Anchorage, Alaska,” according to city spokespeople.

If the city didn't plow, our automobility would be compromised. Undoubtedly, winter storms would transform from minor inconveniences to natural disasters, but that would only emphasize the degree to which we've grown comfortable with the idea of a global consumer society as the natural order. As the history of winter transport demonstrates, there are other options besides snow removal; we just pretend they don't exist. Something to think about next time you're in the mall parking lot under that giant pile of plowed snow.