What if you got up one morning and discovered that someone had built a barrier across the end of your driveway, impassable by automobile, requiring hours of back-breaking work to remove? Would a crime have been committed? In any case, almost everyone would agree that you would be right to be mightily ticked off.

This is exactly what the city of Bend did to me on Feb. 8. A berm of packed snow, four feet high and six feet through (I am not exaggerating), was deposited across my driveway. Generally, one might say that plowing our street is a “service,” especially if there has been more than a foot of snow. But in this case I would hardly call it a service, since I was physically prevented from getting into the street to enjoy it!

One has to question the city’s policies or implementation of them. When the city plows a few inches of snow from our streets and leaves a polite little one-foot-high berm for us to remove, that is perfectly acceptable. But a situation like the one prevailing that morning requires a different response — as any fool can plainly see. It might occur, even to that fool, that a skip-loader might follow the plow and clear driveways that are totally blocked — but perhaps that would require too much in the way of common sense for the city’s policymakers and managers. I can almost hear the spokesman for the city going on about “maximum deployment of our manpower and equipment” and “resources stretched to the limit,” but they sure were not deployed in our neighborhood (with one little exception, which I will get to in a moment). Were there other neighborhoods where people were more effectively trapped in their homes than ours? I don’t think so.

All very amusing (if you’re not the one faced with the Herculean task of chipping through a huge dike of packed snow), but there is a serious side to this issue. Suppose, for instance, my wife had suddenly developed a life-threatening condition during the day Saturday. Would the city suggest I don snowshoes and carry her to the hospital on my back? I guarantee you no ambulance could get into my driveway, and it would take some very athletic EMTs indeed to scale that berm carrying a gurney with a body on it. Surely the city should take seriously the potential legal consequences of this scenario. I know that if my wife were to die because of this sort of idiocy, I would certainly spend my last dime suing their proverbial butt off.

Oh, and about my one sight of the city’s “services” that day. I was out there, in the midst of my five-hour stint of berm-breaking, but not yet having achieved a single breach in that damnable dike, when a city skip-loader came lumbering down our street, bucket in the air. The operator looked straight at me, smiled and waved, and continued on down the street and disappeared in the distance. In the moment, I couldn’t help thinking that he was heading to the aid of some citizen with more pull in city hall. An incendiary implication, you say? Well, why does the city pursue policies that instantly bring to mind exactly that thought?

— David Shoulders lives in Bend.