19.4°C Cloudy 
MAKE HOMEPAGE
Everybody loves a brain-teaser, right? Darn tootin’ everyone does, and that includes you. One of my favourites is the River Conundrum.
A man with a goose, a fox and a bag of corn needs to cross a river on a boat with room for only himself and one item of cargo. If left alone together, the fox would kill the goose, and the goose would eat the corn. How does the man get everything safely to the other side?
Think about it. Don’t give up too easily.
Especially don’t expect an answer from me. Years ago I knew the solution, but years ago I also never gawked into an open refrigerator without the foggiest clue about what I had turned from the stove two seconds earlier to fetch. I had forgotten entirely about the River Conundrum, in fact, until the blizzard twigged my memory.
In many ways similar is the Residential Side Street Conundrum.
A fellow needs to get to work. Tires spinning along his local street, car swerving, he makes barely discernible headway, but forward progress nonetheless. He then notices a neighbour’s car stuck in the snow. The good fellow stops to help. After much heaving, pushing and gesturing of the index finger in little circles clockwise and counterclockwise for the stranded driver to straighten his steering, the stuck vehicle is freed. The fellow returns to his own car, puts it in gear and: zissneeneenee, zissneeneenee (sound effect of spinning tires courtesy Brian’s Discount House of Onomatopoeia). Now he’s the one stuck. Up ahead, the freed motorist, finally on his way to way to work, catches a rear-view mirror glimpse of his benefactor’s new predicament and, of course, flips the bird.
No, no, no. He backs up to return the favour, gets stuck again, and so on — back and forth, forth and back, borth and fack, acts of kindness given and repaid in perpetuity. It’s the Prairie way.
Take what I saw of the neighbourhoood out my own window Monday morning. Gary was hopelessly mired in the snow. Diane — good old Diane, a saint if there ever was — spent every iota of her energy to get Gary back on his way. Then she herself was going nowhere. Gary, a portly fellow who ought to be careful of his blood pressure, wasted no physical effort pushing Diane. I swear, it took all of 40 minutes before the Snerbleflutes finally made it from the front door to their car. Topping off my coffee, I was struck by yet another conundrum, specifically:
What is it going to take, here on the Prairies, before we say to heck with it and call a snow day?
Snow days are standard public policy in eastern Canada, yet useful. Whenever a blizzard renders pointless any effort to engage in daily activity, authorities simply close all schools and non-essential businesses — Wait a second! Man takes goose across river, comes back for fox, drops off fox and returns with goose, leaves goose behind to ferry over corn, and then goes back for goose! There you go. Also: Vince Vaughn. Three week ago Thursday, on Jeopardy!, clue “The brother in the movie Zoolander” — who is Vince Vaughn? In your face, Trebek! It just came to me. And, and . . . instead of a shrugging “I dunno” (excuse me, but I’m on a roll here), “comprehensive local news coverage available nowhere else” ought to have been my goal when interviewed 10 years ago for the position of my newspaper’s editor-in-chief. Plus —
Nope. That’s all I got. (They do come in waves to the aging brain.)
Now I realize my lobby for snow days in is nothing new. I appreciate as well that we in the west consider ourselves a hardy and stalwart people who do not cotton to any swishy, nancy-pants concessions to the weather.
Think, though, of the gasoline saved, the fender-benders prevented and the streets emptied of stuck vehicles so that snowplow operators could do their work properly if we simply stayed put for 24 hours. As it is, that first post-storm day at work or school consists of roughly 87 minutes between the two commutes, time spent hoo-doggying about the blizzard and bellyaching that the plows have yet to be down our blocks to push up those curbside ridges of hard-packed, glaciated street greeb through which we then must chisel, proving ourselves even more hardy and stalwarty.
Call him a wuss, a wimp, a weenie, but it’s high time somebody with clout led a campaign for snow-day declarations. Qualified on all four counts, I would have set the fox free and popped the corn for roast-goose stuffing.
Ron Petrie is a humour columnist with the Regina Leader-Post.
