Saturday, November 12 Minneapolis saw this winter’s first snowfall, and it was a whopper. Eight inches of heavy snow, on top of about an inch of slush. Winter veterans know this is about the worst kind of snow you can get. Very heavy, and it sticks to your shovel, plus it’s hard to move even with a good snow blower. You can wrench your back in a few minutes trying to move fifteen pounds with each scoop.

I hauled out our 5-horsepower snow blower and started it with one pull, glad I’d been smart enough to gas it up and pump up the tires a couple days earlier. This machine had already gone through one winter, so I was pretty confident that it would fight through this particular load of fluffy slush.

I managed to blow clear part of the driveway, sidewalk and about a third of the back apron in front of the garage before the machine bogged down, then started making a kind of strangled screech. I saw smoke and smelled burning rubber. After that, the agitator stopped turning.

Damn. This machine was only one year old, and something’s broken? I was pissed.

I dragged the dysfunctional pile of garbage back to the garage, then shoved it inside.

Shovel time. If you’ve never shoveled heavy, wet snow, I do not recommend it. There are tricks and techniques (car wax on the blade, lever the handle off your thigh), but there is no avoiding the repetitive heavy lifting, especially when heavy snow piles up in a large area and you have to walk twenty feet to dump each fifteen-pound load. I’m willing to try, but I’m fifty one, and my back can’t take it anymore. I managed to clear enough room to back out a car, but then my vertebrae started getting impacted and the muscles went into a rather painful, disabling spasm. I limped into the house, took off my soggy coat (outside was 34F and still snowing heavily) and lay on my back on the living room rug, trying to pop out my lower back by rotating my hips, a semi-yoga thing I learned as a kid.

Things didn’t look too good as I informed my parents of the situation. Luckily, my mother still had the phone number of a local plowing service. She called them and Alito came over a few hours later with his Jeep and plow. 250 HP beats the hell out of 5.

Okay, so now the year-old snow blower doesn’t work, and I’m limping around with a hurt back. I got my back popped out later that night (like cracking your knuckles, but louder), but it just didn’t look like it was going to be a good weekend. Hell, then the Vikings lost to the Bears, and it looked like more snow was on the way. One thing after another. God, god, god!

By Monday morning, things looked a bit better. My back felt okay, and it hadn’t snowed on top of the first pile. In fact, the temperature was above 40F, so the snow was rapidly melting.

My tentative plan was to pile the hundred-pound snow blower into the car, spill gasoline all over the trunk, then angrily dump the machine at the doorstep of the dealer, with a “why is this machine so crappy” attitude.

But then my brother called. He needed help getting downtown, where he was going to meet somebody that wanted to sell a car. He arrived, we went downtown, did his stuff, came back, and I asked him if he wanted to go to lunch. While we talked, the subject of the snow blower came up. He couldn’t believe I was going to take it back to the dealer. My brother is a handyman type that works on cars and motorcycles.

We hauled the offending machine out of the garage, and he pointed to a couple bolts on either side of the intake cowling. Remove those, he said, and you can take out the shaft that leads to the transfer case, which I thought had stripped gears inside. Then he suggested that we look at the blower’s manual.

I grimaced, partly from embarrassment. I used to write crap like that, and I’ve been a critic of how poorly most of them are written. We asked my mother if she knew where the manual was, and she dutifully pulled a big plastic baggie out of a drawer.

The manual, to my delight, was well written. Plenty of useful drawings of the key working parts. We paged through it until we saw the transfer case, and then we saw something even more interesting: a picture of belts and pulleys. Suddenly, I remembered something. The agitator blades had stopped turning after I started hearing a kind of screeching noise, like the noise of a car’s slipping alternator belt on a really cold day.

“That’s it,” I said. “The belt is loose.”

My brother shrugged, and pointed to a cowling covering the pulley area.

Back outside, we located the cowling. My brother’s phone rang, so I fetched a small toolset from my car, loosened one machine screw, and then removed the cowling. Revealed was the pulley mechanism, which included a tensioner roller on a lever. As it rocks forward, the tensioner pushes against the belt to remove slack. When the belt tightens, it grabs hold of the moving pulley, which turns a second pulley on a shaft that makes the agitator grind snow. I worked the lever on the machine’s handle, and watched how the mechanism moved, noting that the tensioner wasn’t pushing quite far enough into the belt to remove all the slack. Well, shoot, the belt was too loose. That’s all it was.

Problem defined. Now, was there a way to make the tensioner push farther against the belt?

I examined the tensioner. Nothing obvious on the lever arm. I walked around the machine. On the left side, I noticed that the wire from the operator handle was fastened to the machine’s frame by a plate, secured by two bolts. But the bolts were inserted through a couple slots, not just round holes. The slots were about an inch and a half long. If I loosened the bolts, I could slide the attachment point…back, thus pulling the wire farther, thus swinging the lever of the tensioner farther.

Good lord, could it really be that simple?

Yes, it could. I made the adjustment in about two minutes, then told my brother about it after he got off the phone.

“Fixed it,” I told him.

We tested the blower on a pile of wet snow. As soon as the blade made contact, the entire machine exploded like a bomb, sending chunks of metal flying everywhere. Tore my fucking head clean off, while the machine lay in smoking ruin.

Kidding! That’s more of a Stephen King ending. In this case, it worked as advertised. Put the cowling back on, blower back in the garage.

Ba-done-zo!

Now, what inspired me to type this tepid little recounting? It was my own transition from can’t do to can do. I started out with no intention of even trying to understand the problem. All I wanted was to rid myself of the problem, shove it off on somebody else, then blame them for it, without ever bothering to try to understand what was really going on. I didn’t want to read the manual, look under the hood, anything. I was basically ready to throw the machine away and get a new one before trying to fix the one I had.

This should sound familiar to those who have witnessed the behavior of what we call tea baggers, or members of the Tea Party. These are people who have become convinced that our entire system of government is like a throwaway appliance. If you don’t like it, change it completely, rather than trying to understand how the system works to make appropriate adjustments. How many times did we see video clips of Tea Partiers being asked for details of why they opposed one thing or another, and they NEVER had any depth to their views?

The problem here is emotionality versus rationality. Rupert’s Dementia basically replaces rational thought processes with an hysterical urge to just get rid of a scapegoat. Just get rid of enough liberals and Democrats, and our country will be just fine. No attempt to understand politics or the root causes of problems, not to mention the reading of manuals.

The trick to beating RD is to understand that any system is like a machine, and then to have the confidence to believe that any machine can be understood, and then fixed. Any machine can be adjusted to work better. Then pass it on. You wonder why “Car Talk” is such a popular radio show? Within the scope of human endeavors, all our problems are fixable. We can make the appropriate adjustments without foolishly throwing the whole thing away. Have a little confidence that you can do it. You might be happily surprised.