The Portland area gets very little snow. In many winters it will get none, or perhaps a couple of slushy mornings. When this area gets cold enough, we are more likely to see ice–and when Portland ices up, it does the job right. Air saturated with moisture will see its water freeze onto any surface that is below freezing temperature. The roads can develop a quarter inch of solid ice. Forget driving, even if the roads weren’t full of terrified morons. Walking is problematic enough.

To want a snow rake in Portland, one would first need to come from a place where the question of rooftop snow accumulation has been an issue. Wisconsinites, Montanans, Alaskans, Coloradoans, Michiganders…you get the picture. One must then be enormously weather-paranoid, having heard stories of six inches of snow some years back. One must then figure out how it is Portland is supposed to get enough snow that it could endanger a sloped roof (such accumulations would be measured in feet, not inches).

Or one must live in the shade of fourteen mature lodgepole pines.

I love the lodgepoles. I love to sit in my wide-but-shallow backyard, indifferent to the peering of the paranoid nutbag on the other side of the fence, smoking my cigar and watching the squirrels do their Looney Tunes re-enactments. We have plentiful birds, and like the squirrels, they have learned I mean them no harm. When I sit outside, I feel close to the land, even though I’m in the Dullest White Suburb of All Time. (It’s not entirely white. On my walks, I sometimes see Indian children playing with toy cricket bats. While we have a somewhat substantial Hispanic population, we keep up appearances by having mediocre Mexican restaurants. However, this is Oregon. Nearly every place is mostly white.)

Problem: my lodgepoles drop enormous amounts of needles. On my back yard’s ground, I can deal with it; a lawn is impractical, and they help trap the moisture in summer. On my roof, it’s a problem. Needle accumulations allow moss to begin, and hold moisture against the roof.

So why not just get on the roof and use a push broom a few times a year, you may ask? Because I’m scared as hell. I’m not afraid to climb a ladder, but the transition to the roof takes me ten minutes. The transition off the roof is even worse. I can only force myself to do the first by condemning myself to a diagnosis of cowardice if I refuse. The second only happens because I’d rather not stay on the roof forever, and I’m not of an age where jumping is a good idea. Another consideration is that I have a repaired Achilles tendon. The ankle angle required to stand upright on a roof facing upslope is a serious strain on a tendon that is still just a tad shorter than the one that never popped. Wouldn’t it be fun to be up on a roof with a re-ruptured Achilles tendon?

If I must get on a roof, I will. If I need not, I will be happier.

Thus, the snow rake with a broom attachment. It is obvious that I can’t leave a lot of needles up there, or the roof will moss up. (I cut a toilet bowl cleaner bottle just so that I could use it to fling Ridmoss all the way to the roof’s apex.) The moss problem is bad enough in Portland and I’d just as soon not make my version of the problem worse. The paranoid wacko neighbor’s roof would appear bright green from the air, so bad is the moss on the shade side. In Portland, the sensible homeowner simply doesn’t play games with roofing.

The snow rake isn’t a panacea. It comes in segments, and I need all 21′ of them. Its length causes its aluminum to flex enough that I have to be gentle with it, lest it break. The broom gets the bulk of the needles, but not all. I have to move a heavy folding ladder several times in order to pull the highest needles down where I can reach them with a normal plastic rake. While I am at it, I always have to clean the eave-troughs because some of the needles will surely land there. Going up and down the ladder makes my knees feel like they contain broken glass. I get to chuck armloads of muddy needles off a ladder into the yard waste bin.

Still beats hell out of getting on the roof, like I did today. There is an eave-trough higher up, it fills up, and it has to be cleaned now and then; the snow rake can’t help me with that one. After that, I decided that I merited a cigar to settle my nerves. If it hadn’t been about 10:30 AM, I might have added a slug of rum to that indulgence. I suppose my neighbors enjoyed watching my ginger hesitancy. If they found it amusing, I can’t blame them.

But if we ever do get that 3′ deep blizzard, we’ll just see who’s laughing then.