Albert Camus, Where Are You?

So here I was shoveling fresh snow out of my driveway at midnight. The weather forecast called for 15 to 20 centimeters of snow overnight (just over half a foot), mixed in with some freezing rain, ice pellets and flying monkeys. I wanted to get a head start on the work as about five or six centimeters had fallen already and I would have less to do tomorrow morning when I needed to leave the house.

As I was nearing the end of my driveway a young man on a bicycle pedaled by and laughed at me. My first thought was, “I’m gonna pummel him with this shovel right now.” Ok, it wasn’t quite a laugh, more of a chuckle, but I’d been working for 45 minutes already and was not in the mood.

I stopped shoveling and watched him struggle away on the bike. Taking my own dictum from a few days ago, I stopped to think about why he had laughed.

I was wearing a winter jacket, baseball hat and my glasses were covered in wet streaks, shoveling my driveway in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm. Nothing funny there.

Had he laughed because of the Sisyphean nature of my task? My driveway runs upwards from the garage by the way…it’s not such a stretch. I looked behind me and sure enough a fresh layer of snow was rapidly filling the previously cleared area. Absurd, yes, but still no laughing matter.

Was it a nervous chuckle, the kind that some people use as a defense mechanism when faced with tragedy? Ah, that must be it. He could see that we were both just another Joseph K., knocking on door upon door, never getting to the end of whatever search we both were on. The young man laboring through the blizzard on his two wheels, dodging cars and monkeys, and I, clearing the never-ending snow had just shared a moment of clarity.

So I threw down my shovel, stuck my tongue out and caught snowflakes for a few seconds before making a snowball and hurling it at the bicycle. I missed but that’s beside the point.