The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

I saw it from the top of the hill at ten minutes past six, in the dark, with the plow lights picking out the road, and I knew before I got close what my cousin had done.

The Haskins Road runs two and a half miles along the top of the Tug Hill in Lewis County, and I had opened every driveway on it between three and a quarter to six that morning.

Now, coming back from my last two drives on the crossroad, I looked down that long white road and saw the mouths of those driveways gone.

Not dusted. Gone. Packed shut with a bank of heavy gray snow.

The storm had dropped twenty-six inches overnight. Up on the Tug Hill that is not a disaster.

That is just January. The lake throws it at us off Ontario and we push it around until April.

The town truck had come through once around half past two, which is right and normal.

A town plow pushes a windrow across the end of every drive, and every driveway man on the hill knows to wait for that first pass.

But after I had cleaned up behind that first pass, somebody had come back down the Haskins Road with the wing down low and tight to the shoulder. And then he had done it again.

I knew the truck by the tracks and I knew the driver without the tracks.

There is one man on that town crew who runs the Haskins Road, and his name is Gordie Bechard. He is my cousin.

I sat there at the top of the hill with my wipers going and my heater fan roaring and I did the arithmetic.

Thirty-one of my driveways were on the Haskins Road and the Beaver Meadow crossroad. Every one of them was shut.

And the third one down on the left belonged to Fern Yancey, who is eighty-one years old and rides a wheelchair van to dialysis three mornings a week.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It was a Wednesday.

Her van came at eight.

The route

I should tell you who I am, so you know what I was looking at that morning.

My name is Rollin Bechard. I am fifty-two years old.

I drive a milk truck most days, a stainless tanker that picks up from the dairy farms between here and Lowville, and in the winter I plow driveways before my route.

I plow thirty-eight of them. I do it with a three-quarter-ton pickup, dark green, with a yellow V-plow on the front, eight and a half feet across.

I keep six bags of sand and two lengths of railroad tie in the bed for weight.

Most of my customers are older people. Widows, widowers, couples who have been on the hill since before the road was paved. People who cannot shovel a two-foot bank anymore and should not try.

I charge three hundred and fifty dollars for the season, from the first storm to the last, no matter how many times it snows.

On the Tug Hill that is a bargain, and I know it. Some years it snows two hundred and fifty inches.

A few of them pay less. Fern Yancey pays two hundred because that is what she can pay, and I never told anyone that, and I am only telling you because it matters later.

My wife, Winnie, keeps the list on the side of our refrigerator. Thirty-eight names, thirty-eight phone numbers, and a star beside the ones who have to get out early. Fern had two stars.