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Plowguy #3
Fri Apr 15, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton --Over the last two days on The Weather Notebook, we've climbed on board a snowplough with driver Jim Buckbee who clears roads in the Sierra Nevada range in California. His talents extend beyond maneuvering his 60,000 pound truck around curvy roads. He's also a poet!
JB: When I wrote the poem we were discussing all the different counties and how they do the snow removal and the biggest thing is when you're working a day shift and you switch to a night shift without any sleep and so the whole thing is geared toward surviving another night and it just started clicking I just started writing and it was like wow that sounds pretty good.
One night I was just really bored and I was doing a back to back shift and it was snowing really hard and so I recited it over our radio.
(Reads over radio) Another night by Jim Buckbee... When the snowflakes fly and the wind blows so cold/it's the sound of steel that curls my toes/it's a long night ahead and that's my foe/ as I drop my plough and head down the road/I only pray that my lights will be bright/as the snowflakes dance I strain at the sight/but my chains bite deep into the ice and I pray for that guiding light/that makes everything alright/the drifts pile high, but that's alright/I'll just hit them with all my might and shove them over to the right another night.
All of a sudden they had all these requests coming in from different areas that had picked it up on their scanners wanting to know where it had come from and if they could get a copy of it so I started sending people copies of my poem.
That's snowplow driver and sometime poet, Jim Buckbee of California. Thanks today to correspondent Robin White for help on the story. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported in part by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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