A Law Didn’t Do This

Reader and commenter Bob Johnson asked an interesting question yesterday:

• Are you obliged to clear your sidewalks? Last place I lived with a sidewalk we would get a ticket if we didn’t clear the snow fast enough.

I know the sort of ordinance Bob’s talking about. Every city has one. What they’re trying to accomplish is legislating civility. It’s not possible. When I scoff at publications like Forbes endlessly talking about how swell urban hellholes are, it’s mostly because they reiterate a laundry list of legislated civility that supposedly makes crummy places swell. Last time I checked, it is illegal to kidnap, rape, murder, and eat your neighbors. Didn’t stop Jeff Dahmer from costing Milwaukee a few slots on Money Magazine’s Glorious Places To Live, Unless They Don’t Have A Subway So #$%@ Them.

People do the right thing around here, without being asked. The sidewalks are plowed, just like the street is, by the town. The town doesn’t worry about how much salt I’m putting on my puttanesca, it puts it on the street after it plows it. It minds its own business. Its business is the safety and comfort of its citizens, not massaging the neuroses of martinets and the fools that elect them. The local government is not corrupt, and by extension, is not incompetent. It doesn’t try to do too much, but what it does try, it succeeds at.

Here’s an object lesson in how it works here. That’s our neighbor, Gayle, who walked her snowblower up the hill from her house and blew all the snow out of our driveway early this morning, without being asked. She knows we can’t afford a snowblower, and we had a long morning of shoveling ahead of us. My older son is blazing a flying saucer down the side yard with his little brother instead of shoveling right now. The law of unforeseen circumstances works both ways. Good things happen downstream when people are pleasant. Gayle, like so many of my  new neighbors, is a peach.

It’s not as if there’s nothing to govern snow removal in Rumford. You’re supposed to remove snow from the access (driveway, for instance) to your house so that an emergency vehicle could get to it. That doesn’t come up much. It’s mostly to keep absentee landlords of abandoned properties from ignoring the need for a fire engine to be able to get to a burning building whether someone’s living in it or not. When my wife and I drove around looking for a house in Maine a year ago, we didn’t look at any occupied houses, but every house had the driveway plowed out.

That’s another of my neighbor’s houses. It looks nice in the snow. Rich is another fellow, like Gayle, who puts his genial nature out into the world, like messages in a bottle, not knowing exactly who, if anybody, might read them, but knowing it’s worthwhile to try anyway. He cannot number the kids he’s taught and coached, and hired to mow his lawn for more than their efforts merit, I’m sure. Decent people don’t keep score like that anyway.

So no, no one tells the people who live here to remove the snow. But then again, anywhere that actually requires a sign telling people it’s required by law that they wash their hands after crapping is sure to have feces in the food.