HOW SLOW CAN YOU GO?

Tim Morgan is a professional obstacle. He wakes up at 3:30 a.m. every weekday morning just to be passed by, avoided, and occasionally flipped-off.
Morgan is a street sweeper. Plodding along Pictou County streets every morning during the spring and summer months, his boxy red vehicle scrubs away the dirt that accumulates over winter, keeping grime from entering our water supply.
So how tough is it to drive two kilometres-per-hour from dusk until noon? I joined Morgan on Thursday to find out.
First of all, I should mention that, to me, 4 a.m. is an hour synonymous with really great nights and really bad mornings. This fits the latter, as I poke around a dark garage parking area with a bag of four Red Bull in hand until Morgan arrives.
A grey cat appears and Morgan lets him in. The cat hops through the office door and heads for a bowl of food on the ground, making him the town's laziest mouser.
"That's Kramer," Morgan says. "He's our buddy -- part of the staff here."
With Kramer finished breakfast and the sun still in bed for a while, Morgan and I hit the road.
Today's stop is Pictou - Church Street, specifically. The town of New Glasgow owns the $170,000 rig, but rents it out hourly to the other municipalities to reduce overall costs. Morgan estimated the cost at $140-per-hour, meaning Pictou will pay in the area of $1,000 for one of its main streets to receive a big cleaning.
For those of you most familiar with street-sweeping vehicles because of their traffic-blocking ways, know this - that thing is a beast on the highways. It travels highway speeds fine until we reach Pictou to fill up the water tank. As dawn approaches, we enter the downtown area and things get slow and loud. If you were sleeping near this area on Thursday morning, I'm sorry for my part in waking you up.
This thing couldn't outrun a dandelion, but Morgan watches closely through his window on the dual-wheeled vessel, making sure his $400 brooms don't pick up anything with high clogging potential - a mud-flap, for example. I begin to liken the street cleaning process to getting your teeth polished at the dentist. If you only get it done a couple times a year, they really pay attention to detail.
It's about 6 a.m., and you could dance in the streets of Pictou. It's a ghost town at this hour, except for the regulars already barking their breakfast orders at a local diner.
He tells me about some of the early mornings, when late-night bar stragglers lumber their way home, sometimes leaving a gift of partially digested pizza in the gutters. If you've got to move at a sluggish pace for a work day, Morgan is good company. He's easy-going and funny, with ample patience for the tedium.
The cleaning goes in loads. Stops are necessary to refill the truck with water and dump out the vacuumed dirt.
I was amazed at how fast it accumulates. After one load, a little pile of mud is left. After two, I'm sensing a pattern -- our streets get pretty darn dirty over the winter.
By 8 a.m., I've already killed a bagel and two Red Bull. I'm crashing. Driving by the same buildings on Church Street over and over begins to make my eyes hurt - I can recite every yard sale poster tacked on a telephone pole, every glow sign advertising food specials.
I'm starting to doze, and longer stretches of silence begin to occur. Sometimes, the speed of the vehicle hits me like a spoonful of molasses, and I start to wish the hours away. Meanwhile, Morgan sees a missed spot and throws the truck in reverse. His attention to detail leaves each side of the street noticeably cleaner, a mark of his decade of experience.
So, how does he do it?
"I know the radio stations pretty well," Morgan jokes. "Sometimes I throw it on CBC Radio just to hear a story - anything different to kill some time."
He doesn't take many breaks, stopping only long enough for a coffee. Traffic has begun to pick up, and cars doing just under speed limit look like they were shot out of a cannon as they whiz by our windows. Some classy motorists let out a honk at the injustice of getting stuck behind a well-meaning, albeit pokey, municipal vehicle. None of this fazes Morgan. Kids love us, asking the driver to toot his horn as we drag by their home.
While the pace is painstaking, the results are clear - Morgan has made the street's curbs a much nicer place, and there's a large pile of wet dirt to prove it.
To be honest, I wouldn't have paid much attention to such work a few days ago. Now, I'll give a second glace to see how things shape up near the curb.
As we stretch past 10 a.m., I'm pretty much pooped. The third Red Bull is gone, I really need to pee, and my legs are still from the cramped cab. At one point, I swear the digital clock on the dashboard counted backward. Is it really 10:34? Wasn't it 10:45 a minute ago?
One more drive up Church and we're done. It takes about a half-an-hour to do one side of the street and the end result is a pile of gunk big enough to fill my editor's office. Morgan estimates the total at six tons - that's six tons of crap not presently about to blow into Pictou Harbour, good news for all involved.
I vow to never litter again, and postpone plans to sweep my kitchen floor for at least one day.
As for Morgan, I think he'll miss the company, too.
"Hope you enjoyed it," Morgan said. "I'll be talking to myself in the truck tomorrow, and nobody will be listening."