The trouble began Sunday night. Just as the storm was blowing at its wildest, I trudged out to buy milk and found two women trying to maneuver a helpless old-model compact off our Brooklyn street, two-thirds of the way down the block. Stuck at an angle near a buried fire hydrant, they were pushing and spinning and getting nowhere, with the smell of burning rubber noxiously sharp in the cold air. “Do you need some help?” No one ever answers right away, “Yes, thank you.” They’re too caught in the immediate distraction of their trap, too angry or embarrassed or wary. The women, black and in their thirties, considered the offer of a stranger emerging out of the blizzard. I explained that we could move the car fifty or sixty feet up the street, following the tracks of another car that was stuck farther up. “And how is that going to be helpful?” one of them demanded. My idea was to guide the car into a row of free parking spaces ahead of mine, but she was right: the tracks were disappearing in the snow even as we stood talking, and though we got the car out of its rut, we couldn’t advance more than five feet.

By then, an emergency vehicle had appeared behind the car. I went over to talk to the driver. “Get the car off the road any way you can,” he said tersely. “Back up, go forward, back up, go forward.” That was all the help he was offering, and I relayed it to the two women. I wondered what had possessed them to drive out into the storm in a car that could disappear in a mid-sized New York pothole. With one of them at the wheel, me and the other pushing, the car backed up and went forward a few times, and sure enough, it gained some maneuverability. Suddenly the hydrant seemed to offer a perfectly good parking place, which had been their idea in the first place—I needed fifteen minutes to get rid of my city-dwelling scruples and reach their level of survival pragmatism. And somehow, shoving the side of the car from nose and then tail, while the driver turned hard to the right and left, we managed to move it sideways toward the curb. They ended up at an oblique angle at least five feet into the street. “I’d say that’s a hundred!” one of them exclaimed. We exchanged handshakes and names, and I almost didn’t mind that the store was shuttered and there would be no milk in the morning.

On Monday, the ledge of snow in the doorway was above the knee: no way to leave the house except by digging from inside out. Up and down the block, cars were buried in drifts. Someone had carved a canyon from the sidewalk to a driver’s side door through a roof-high snow pile that was partly composed of shovelings. In the economy of a storm this big, there was nowhere to get rid of snow that didn’t encroach on someone else’s space, and some shovelfuls must have been tossed back and forth a few times. All day we waited for the plows, but they didn’t come.

Instead, one car after another turned off Flatbush Avenue, which was slushy but passable, and onto our street, where they were all brought to a standstill halfway up the block. Along with whatever neighbors happened to be out on the street, I helped push one or two back down toward Flatbush, but soon I turned against them. This Audi, this minivan, even this New Jersey pickup truck had no business driving unplowed side streets. And why did these interlopers from elsewhere keep choosing ours? Why didn’t they take a hint from the vehicles already stuck in snow directly up ahead? Not only were they behaving stupidly, they were keeping the snowplow—if it ever showed up—from clearing our block. My neighbors and I shook our heads and fumed. These drivers didn’t live here, they were just on their way through, so they didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, they were on their own. And all day Monday, Monday evening, and Tuesday morning, they kept coming, clumsy sea mammals blindly following one another onto shore, and they kept getting beached. Sunday night’s generous feelings were long gone.

Twenty inches of snow isn’t a 7.5 earthquake or Category 4 hurricane. Unless it’s life-threatening, an emergency rarely lifts human beings above themselves. A snowstorm like this is bad enough to make people parochial and aggrieved, but not disastrous enough to make them generous and heroic. The stories of people trapped on subway trains all night, of hundreds of 911 calls going unanswered for hours, remained abstract, because we were in no actual danger. And so, instead, it seemed as if our block was being singled out for idiocy and neglect. The scene on the street brought my neighbors and me into a fraternity of usefulness and scorn: we locals did one another little favors—here’s some salt, thanks for shoveling my walk—and remarked on the folly of outsiders insisting on driving a car through such snow. The circle of inclusion was now the neighborhood—more narrowly, the block—but this bond wasn’t strong enough to prompt one of us to put an orange cone of warning at the bottom of the street, let alone to organize all of us into teams that could shovel out the whole block. Urban solidarity had a limit, and some quaint notion of deserving city services kept us waiting passively on the silent street for the plow that, by midday Tuesday, still hadn’t shown up.

The last vehicle to attempt our street was a moving van. A couple was leaving their apartment for another on the next block. Apparently they couldn’t wait. The moving crew consisted of three Spanish speakers, and, as they were loading up their van with furniture and bedding, you could almost see the massive vehicle sinking deeper into snow. The treacherous snow was just a few feet ahead of them—they’d never get through it. I’d had enough. We had an out-of-town trip planned, and if the plow—which was sure to show up any minute now—couldn’t reach the point where our car was parked, we’d have to bag it. I stalked over to the movers. “What’s your plan for getting off the street?” The driver, who spoke some English, assured me that they could do it easily—after all, they’d made it this far. “But the worst part is right in front of you.” He shrugged. I asked why they had to do the job today. He said that the company—no surprise—had a backlog, and it wanted to get this one done, and someone must have thought our neighborhood was clear. He went back to work.

I went back inside. When I came out, a little after noon, the movers had finished loading and had actually managed to advance their van ten or fifteen feet. They were doing it by shoveling the entire street in front of them—two or three of them furiously working the snow, without gloves, then laying the blankets they use to protect furniture in front of the van’s tires and creeping forward. Stage by stage, they were getting close to the intersection. I walked around the neighborhood to see if there were any passable streets and found an exit route that a four-wheel-drive vehicle might clear to a major avenue. By the time I returned, the van was past the intersection, part way up the next block, and the movers were already unloading it. They had plowed our street with shovels. Outsiders on the clock, they had done the city’s work—our work.

Photograph: WanderingtheWorld, via FlickrCC