The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

Six-ten in the morning

I did not have time to be angry. I want to be honest about that.

I would like to tell you I was calm because I am a good man, but I was calm because I was busy.

I knew about Fern’s van because I had been plowing her drive for nine years.

Merna Shue drives the wheelchair van for the county transportation service, and she picks Fern up at eight sharp on her treatment days.

Fern’s chair at the dialysis center in Watertown is at nine-thirty. It is an hour off the hill on a good day.

If Fern misses that chair, they do not just move her to the afternoon. They try, but the chairs are full.

And a woman on dialysis cannot skip a treatment the way you or I would skip a dentist appointment.

Fern told me once what happens when the fluid builds up. She said it like she was telling me the weather. I never forgot it.

There is a highway superintendent for our town, and he is a fair man, and I could have called him.

But a complaint to the superintendent is a letter, a talk with the crew, a town board meeting in two weeks. It takes a week at least.

Fern’s van was coming at eight.

So I pulled my phone out and called the milk dispatcher. I told her I would be two hours late on the route and I told her why.

She said half the farms on my run had not opened their lanes yet anyway, and to go.

Then I called Winnie, who was already up making coffee, and I said, “Gordie put the wing in every one of them on Haskins. I’m going back down the line.”

She was quiet a second. Then she said, “Do Fern’s first.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

The first one

The town plow throws a different snow than the sky does. What falls overnight on the hill is light, and a V-plow lifts it like nothing.

What comes off the wing of a town truck at thirty miles an hour is packed and wet and heavy, almost like wet concrete.

I came down the hill to Fern’s drive and looked at the bank.

It was close to four feet high at the mouth and maybe six feet deep, solid, with a gray crust where the salt and sand had gone into it.

I set the plow in the V, point out front, to split that bank down the middle.

You do not hit a town windrow with a straight blade unless you want to stop dead and bounce your face off the steering wheel.

I went in slow, in low range, and the V bit into it and split it and threw half left and half right.

The truck shuddered and the tires spun once and caught. I backed out, came in again, and broke through to the drive.

Then I flipped the blade to scoop, the wings forward, and carried the loose snow off the mouth and up onto the bank at the side, where it would not slide back.

Three passes. I checked my watch. Four minutes, start to finish.

Fern’s porch light was on. I could see her shape in the storm door, a small woman with white hair, standing there in the glow of her porch light watching me.

She lifted one hand. I lifted mine back.

I did not get out. I had thirty more to do.