Excerpt from Could You Be Starting From Somewhere Else? Sketches From Buffalo And Beyond

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Vintage Photo of the Author with His Sister Mary Lee

Chapter 4: Odysseus in the Snow

From spring 1953 through summer 1960, I had a morning paper route delivering the Buffalo Courier-Express. The paper was published 365 days a year, and during those seven years, I rose daily about 5:00 a.m. to complete my route on Highgate between Bailey Avenue and Eggert Road. I had about sixty customers, and they expected their paper before 7:00 a.m. regardless of the weather conditions. I could not sleep in lest my daily schedule, especially during the school year, collapse before it began. Unless I was really sick, we were heading to Muskoka for vacation, or I had cajoled one of the neighbor Dressel brothers into taking the route for a few days, every morning Brandy, my big black Lab who slept on my bed every night, and I traveled up and down Highgate, delivering to my slumbering customers the news of Buffalo and the world.

Ever Faithful Brandy

The papers arrived in a large, green box in front of the house. Brandy had superb hearing, and every morning when he heard the deliveryman open and then slam shut the lid, he stirred and woke me to begin our journey. For most of the year, I carried the papers slung in a sack over my shoulder as I rode my clunky Schwinn bicycle from house to house, tossing papers on front porches or sliding them behind screen doors. As Odysseus sailed among the Greek isles on his perilous journey, I skillfully maneuvered through, under, or around daunting obstacles: narrow driveways, parked cars, low-hanging tree limbs, baby strollers, sporting goods, and kids’ toys strewn haphazardly across front steps. Accompanied by my faithful companion who knew the way, I ventured forth from home, persevered through rain, sleet, hail, heat, and, from early December through late March, snow upon snow. Most of the year—spring, summer, and fall—I completed my mission and returned home in about forty-five minutes.

Winter, however, demanded greater fortitude. Snowfalls of six to eight inches were not uncommon, nor were single-digit temperatures. On very cold mornings, when Brandy stirred, I hesitated because I knew what awaited me. We usually awoke around 5:00, but when a heavy snowfall was expected the night before, I set the alarm for as early as 4:30.

Because Father always turned the furnace down before going to bed, on many winter mornings I awoke in a room so cold that frost covered the inside of the double-pane windows. Sliding from under two life-preserving Hudson Bay blankets into this frigid air required precise timing and carefully sequenced movements. As Brandy yawned and stretched at the foot of the bed, I gazed at my dresser, reviewing in which drawer I kept my wool sweaters, socks, and long johns, then glanced at the closet where my coat, hat, and snow pants hung. I had to be sure that the closet door was open.

I bolted from bed, tore off pajamas, darted stark naked to the dresser, opened the drawer, pulled on wool socks, top and bottom long johns, two shirts, two sweaters, and flannel-lined jeans, then ran to the closet for snow pants, a wool cap, and winter coat, its pockets bulging with two pairs of gloves. Armored against the elements, Brandy and I dashed through the even colder attic and downstairs into the kitchen, where I gulped down a glass of—what else?—cold milk before donning my boots to head outside—or try to. A heavy snowfall meant that before I got to the paper box, I struggled with the side door that was jammed shut. Many a winter morning, Brandy, unable to wait until I opened the damn door, peed in the hall. Once to the box, I quickly loaded the papers into my sack and trudged off, muffled against the stinging cold and guided by my coal-black dog, who stood out boldly against the snow. These winter treks were heroic: Brandy bounding ahead of me, forging a path, I bravely bearing my load and high-stepping in the deep, relentless snow. We were solitary travelers in a great white wilderness, roaming among the wind-whipped mounds of snow that crunched beneath my boots, step after step from house to house, summoning winter’s most distinct sound. By 5:30 or 6:00 on winter mornings, the only signs of life in the neighborhood were the tracks that marked our lonely journey through the sleeping world.

Obstacles abounded. If a plow had come through the day before, huge piles of snow buried the sidewalks on both sides of Highgate for the length of my route. Scaling these piles, block after block, demanded strength and courage. No sane person shovels before 5:00 a.m., so a heavy snowfall overnight often obliterated the outlines of porch steps while concealing a layer of treacherous ice below. I frequently slipped on this hidden ice and cascaded akimbo down the steps. On Sundays, when the papers were much heavier, and I couldn’t carry them in my sack, I loaded them precariously on a sled, terrified that as I hauled it over the ragged mounds of snow, the sled would tip and scatter the intricately folded papers that I knew I could never reassemble. Even with help from one of the Dressel kids, the Sunday route in winter seemed endless. Despite the innumerable layers of clothing, by the time I reached home, most of my body was cold.

If I complained about the elements, Mother assured me that crawling out of bed at 4:30 to deliver the paper would make me a stronger and better person. When I asked her, “How?” she rambled about character building, taking responsibility, and overcoming hardship. I developed healthy lungs, strong legs, and a respect for winter, all of which proved immensely beneficial when I started climbing Washington State’s glaciated mountains in my mid-fifties. I also learned that one should finish what one has started, whether it was a graduate degree, a book manuscript, a twelve-thousand-foot climb, or a marriage. I sometimes wonder, however, how many of life’s important lessons I might have learned playing chess.

As I reflect now on that experience, I realize that having a morning paper route in Buffalo was primarily a spiritual experience. Being Irish Catholic, my mother convinced her children that life would be hard because God—as in yesteryears Zeus—sent us trials that, like Odysseus’, we had to endure. If we succeeded in these trials, especially the wintry ones—if we stayed the course between the snow of Scylla and the cold of Charybdis—did not lose faith or quit, we would be rewarded, if not in this life, then surely in the next, which I began to suspect was in Florida.

The longer I delivered the Courier-Express on those formidable winter mornings, the more I believed that heavy snowfalls and frigid temperatures, along with Brandy’s faulty bladder, were gifts that God sent to me because He genuinely cared for my spiritual welfare. Like Homer’s wandering hero, at the end of each winter route—tired, wet, and cold—I reveled in my successful return home.

Mother’s exhortations on the virtues of having a morning paper route also led me to petition God about the spiritual state of my best friends on the street, Danny Miller and the Dressel brothers. Every night, I knelt next to my bed and earnestly pleaded with God to arrange for Danny and the Dressels to get a morning paper route. Figuring that I already had a leg up on salvation, I wasn’t about to relinquish mine, but I hoped that an opening might develop somewhere else in the neighborhood, maybe on Winspear or Rounds or Lisbon, and that God could arrange for my buddies to get a route. Getting a morning route, even if they had to share it, would signal that they, too, were potentially blessed by its rigors and hardships. A few years after I began my petition drive, Danny Miller got a Buffalo Evening News route on Highgate, delivering the paper six days per week between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m., a time by which, even after one of Buffalo’s legendary snowfalls, most people would have shoveled their driveways and sidewalks even if plows had been through earlier in the day. The Dressel brothers never did get a route.

Despite my faith in the righteousness of God’s will and the piety of my prayers, I remained bewildered by the unanswered existential question of who is chosen to get what paper route in cold, snowy Buffalo, and how being chosen or not might be related to one’s spiritual destiny. I learned to accept my lot, to persevere through whatever winter threw at me, to be grateful for the chance to prove my worthiness, and to pray for an early spring.

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Michael Shurgot published his memoir, Could You Be Starting From Somewhere Else? Sketches From Buffalo And Beyond in 2014 through the Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. Today, he is a retired Shakespeare scholar and professor, and the author of essays, short stories, a memoir, and three nonfiction books (focused on Shakespeare’s characters and plays). His newest releases are novels that compose the Green River Trilogy: Green River Saga (Sunstone Press, 2020); Raven Mountain: A Mythic Tale (Sunstone Press, 2023); and Seotse: A Visionary Tale (Sunstone Press, 2024). Visit the author at MichaelShurgot.com.