from tyler gibb So there I am, reading the Saturday morning comics before anyone on my block. It's 6 a.m. by the time Ludo pulls up in the pick-up truck rigged with a broad yellow plow across the front.   I open the front door to the eerie winter darkness of early morning. When it snows over Montreal in the mid winter, the sky remains pink and luminescent all night long. It was that way this morning.   The snow was still falling slowly enough that for a second you think that maybe it's actually you that's slowly rising.   Ludo was looking pretty good for someone being medicated for pneumonia. His normally well groomed hair was in a tuft like that of a gorilla's, but what does it matter to the tranquil white morning? He courteously clears the drive-way of my parents house, where i've been staying and then we're off to do the rounds.   Being that he's ill he asked me to come along to help shovel walk ways while he dropped and dragged, pushed and plowed the snow from thirty some driveways. I'm not exactly in peak physical condition and as it turns out, my boots aren't waterproof, but the experience was to be most rewarding in the sense that it was simply a new experience. It hadn't been since my days as a paper-boy that i'd ventured out into the dark winter's morning before most people were awake. At that time, no one had ever heard of having a contractor plow their drive-way for them and so paper-boys had to wade through thigh deep snow drifts.   This peaceful time of day has it's own life now, where it did not before. The dune covered suburban streets are populated in this dim hour by groaning and rumbling machinery which does not seem to rouse the citizens huddled in their perfect little warm houses. Yellow lights blink across your vision and then disappear before you can identify their source as pick-up trucks and tractors whisk past the junctions of streets without regard for stop signs.   Nearly every house has stakes placed in their yard to mark the boundary of their drive-ways. All the stakes are different sizes and colours as their are many contractors who rally for business in the upper-middle class areas populated by the lazy.   "There ought to be an association of snow removal companies or something so that we could organize it so that each company plows say exclusively a certain number of streets," Ludo comments as we make for the open road once more to head across town to more customers. "Then at least we wouldn't spend the whole morning running around to a single lot on all kinds of different streets."   But that's not how it works. The business of landscaping has many faces here. Grass in the summer, leaves in the autumn and snow in the winter. And the competition for customers is fierce. So fierce in fact that over the summer, local news papers were reporting a story about letters that were delivered to all the clients of a certain landscaper. The letters were to falsely inform these clients that their contractor was affiliated with our Montreal chapter of the notorious biker gang, Hell's Angles. The letters were believed to be send by a rival landscaper.   I watch the naked trees and waves of snow rush by as we four-wheel it along these rich streets. The idea saddens me that all this rivalry and lack of cooperation is completely surrounding the laziness of so many suburbanites.   Landscaping on a domestic level is a relatively new area of blue collar work and it's just a little disappointing to see that we are as a society are still finding new ways to get outdoors less, do less work and be more obese.   We shovelled and plowed and i could understand the addiction to this sluggishness as i mentally projected myself into these dark and quiet houses. To wake and dress in good trousers and good shoes and to step out onto your walk without concern for snow or ice, it must be very easy to get used to. Much more, it must be impossible to go back, once your shovel has been retired. I can sympathize, though understanding is still difficult to do.   We finished our rounds before the snow had stopped falling, indicating that there would be more to do very soon. As the sun rises in the east, everywhere in the city there are entire crews of men and women watching the sky over the donut shop parking lots from their rumbling diesel trucks and plows.