It was a winter weather tale as old as, well, modern time: car vs. the snow plow.

"There's our friend and our nemesis, the plow. Ugh," said David Bradley, whose car was buried Wednesday by a plow clearing streets in Toronto, Canada.

Forty-five minutes later, he was still trying to dig out his car from a fierce snowstorm that paralyzed parts of the United States and Canada, leaving hundreds of thousands with out power and stranding thousands more.

Similar scenes were playing from Wisconsin to Michigan, from Kansas to Texas, as thousands began digging out from a storm that began last Sunday as a blizzard in the Great Plains.