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Resourceful Bostonians rise to a ritual challenge

Residents of Mattapan, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and South Boston work hard to clean up snow after the blizzard.
Residents of Mattapan, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and South Boston work hard to clean up snow after the blizzard. (Video by Alex Lancial, Globe Staff.)

Cue the snow blowers, trusty shovels, or handy broom.

Digging out Wednesday — after a monstrous blizzard blanketed the region, crippled travel, and silenced the city — became a back-breaking enterprise. Shovels snapped. Snow blowers ran out of gas. And a broom was simply no match for rising snowbanks.

“I’m too old for this,’’ lamented 56-year-old Juanita Jarrett, as she jammed her shovel into a thick snowbank in front of her Harvard Street driveway in Dorchester. The shovel bounced back and cracked.

“This is my third one,’’ Jarrett said.

While traffic resumed on the city’s cleared main arteries, many residents on snow-caked side streets endured, with two-lane streets reduced to one. Even along busy main thoroughfares, residents trudged through thigh-high snow on sidewalks. Bostonians spent most of the day bent over, shovel in hand.

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Bundled in scarves, heavy coats, and gloves, they chipped away, shoveling walkways for homebound neighbors, heaping snow onto already-filled front yards, and leveling a common rebuke against those pesky snowplow commandos who clean the streets but also block residents in.

“I understand why they do it. You have to put it somewhere,’’ said Walter Woods, a 69-year-old Hyde Park resident who was already two hours into digging out his corner lot Wednesday morning. A mound of snow rose about 7 feet high at the corner. His driveway was a wall of snow. And his wife was using a broom to clean out their buried cars.

But Woods took the challenge in stride, resigned as many Bostonians were to the act of digging out — a ritual as old as the shovel itself.

“I’ve got a nice snow blower,’’ Woods said, revving it up. “And it works.”

Along the side streets, residents chipped in. In Dorchester’s Lower Mills section, Nick Flores and two friends faced a monumental challenge outside his sister-in-law’s restaurant, Sweet Life Bakery & Cafe. They shoveled the sidewalk until the concrete glistened. They dug out the back driveway. They had been at it for nearly two hours, when Flores’s snow blower ran out of gas.

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“I guess we are gluttons for punishment,’’ said Flores, a 54-year-old Dorchester resident. “We don’t mind. It’s family. We live here. We have to help out.”

On Columbia Road in South Boston, a mysterious helper had saved Beth Yered a lot of heavy lifting. When she checked on her vehicle in the afternoon, much of the snow had been cleared out.

“I actually took a picture of it and put in on Facebook,’’ Yered, 37, said. “I have no idea who it was. . . . I was blown away.”

And so it went throughout the city.

On Tacoma Street in Hyde Park, it would have taken Dolores Randolph three trips back and forth to clear her driveway and her yard. But instead, she did it with one giant try — with the help of a group of boys and young men calling themselves “The Fab 5.” Three are brothers, two are cousins, and all are related.

The group formed last year to make extra cash. Two of them tackled the driveway; the others, the sidewalk.

“We want her to get out of her driveway,” said the group’s most vocal member, 13-year-old Rolando Carrero.

Angela Willie shoveled the walkway from the front door of her home on Delhi Street in Mattapan.Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff

Over on Delhi Street in Mattapan, Angela Willie was digging out by herself — one step at a time. She was boxed in by the time she got to the end of her narrow front gate.

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But she was determined. With gospel singer Kirk Franklin’s “Let It Go (Shout)” booming from her ear buds, the Mattapan landlord toiled to ensure that all the entrances and walkways were cleared at her multifamily home.

Tyrone Thornton, a 53-year-old Mattapan resident, also had a strategy. His goal was to liberate his van from the snow on the street and worry about two other vehicles in the driveway later. The snow in the yard was so high, it almost topped the fence and served as an easy lookout for Thornton’s dog.

The worst part of it, he said, was the cold.

“It’s the wind,’’ Thornton said. “It just blows back everything in the yard.”

Over in Jamaica Plain, Fletcher Lang, a 28-year-old pastor, was towing a blue sled with his 1½-year-old daughter, Kennedy, atop.

“I’m enjoying it,’’ Lang said, as they headed to the nearby park. “I was working at home, [her] mom’s pregnant, and we’re trying to get out of the house.”

Matt Samson, 28, of Roslindale, also got a break.

A plower helped clear the driveway earlier in the day, leaving Samson to clear a portion of the sidewalk. He took three digs into the snow. And then it happened. The handle on his shovel broke. Samson paused.

“Got to get reinforcement,’’ he said, before walking off to get another shovel.


Meghan E. Irons can be reached at meghan.irons@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @meghanirons.

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