The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

But I also knew what happened to the customers of those other two outfits. The prices went up forty cents a gallon the first winter.

The office moved to Duluth. And when you called, you got a phone tree and a girl who did not know where Angora was.

Most of our customers are farmers and older folks on lake places and young families who bought somebody’s grandpa’s homestead and are still fixing the roof.

A lot of them pay on a budget plan, so much a month, and some of them are behind every spring and catch up every fall.

Grandpa carried those people for fifty years. I had carried them for nineteen.

I told Knute no in April, and again in August.

What I did not know until later was that Knute was four months behind on his own house.

He had refinanced to buy into a snowmobile dealership that went under in the spring, and the bank had sent him a letter.

He never told me. I would have tried to help him if he had.

That is the only excuse I can give him, and it is not an excuse. Being behind on your own house is a real trouble.

Chaining up the heat for twenty-six families two days before a freeze, to win an argument with your cousin, is something else entirely.

I sat in the cab of the bobtail with the heater running and thought about it the way Grandpa taught me to think about a problem on the route: what is the worst thing that happens, and when does it happen.

The worst thing was a tank running dry. When a tank runs empty, the law says you cannot just refill it and walk away.

You have to shut it off, fill it, and do a leak check on every line and appliance in the house before you relight anything.

On a farm with an old furnace and a water heater and a kitchen range, that is an hour and a half per house, if nothing is wrong.

Multiply that by however many ran out over the weekend, with the temperature below zero, and I would still be relighting pilots at Thanksgiving.

People ask why I did not just cut the chain. Rolf asked me that, too, about ten minutes later when I called him.

My husband works twelve-hour shifts at the taconite plant in Mountain Iron, and he was on his break with his hard hat in his lap.

“I have bolt cutters in the shop,” he said. “I’ll come over after shift and cut it myself and he can call whoever he wants.”

“It’s half his tank, Rolf,” I said. “Legally it’s half his. If I cut his lock, I hand him exactly the fight he wants, and the sheriff’s deputy has to stand there and decide whose tank it is, and nobody gets any gas while they decide.”

“Then call a lawyer,” he said.

“A lawyer takes all winter,” I said. “The tanks are low this week. Not next spring. This week. Somebody’s furnace goes out Saturday morning whether or not a judge has read the papers.”

Rolf was quiet for a minute.

“What do you need from me,” he said.

“I need you to let me make one phone call,” I said.

“And then I might need you to sleep on the couch a couple nights so you don’t hear me leave at four in the morning.”

The phone call was to Einar Haugen.

Einar is seventy-seven years old and he drove our route for my grandfather for thirty-six years, from the year the plant opened until his knees quit.