The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

Down the line

I want to tell you what that next hour and a half looked like, because I have heard it told since by people who were not there, and they make it sound like a movie.

It was not a movie. It was work.

Alton Rhinehart’s drive was next, on the right. Same bank. Same gray crust. V to split it, scoop to carry it. Four minutes. His kitchen light came on while I was backing out.

Then two places side by side, a mother and her grown son. Then the old schoolhouse somebody turned into a home years ago.

Then a widow named Lavern who has lived on that road since the Eisenhower years.

Some of those banks were worse than others.

Where the road dips past the cedar swamp, Gordie had come close enough to the shoulder that the wing had thrown snow fifteen feet up some of the drives. Those took six minutes.

Where the road runs high and open across the top, the wind had already started drifting the windrows, and the mouths were long and low instead of tall.

Those went fast. Two minutes, some of them.

I did not stop for coffee. I did not stop to look at anything. I had my thermos on the seat and I did not open it until it was over.

Somewhere around the fifteenth driveway, the sky started to come up behind the hill.

It went from gray to a cold pink and then a pale gold, and the snow on the fields turned from blue to white all at once, the way it does up here.

At the twentieth I passed Gordie’s tracks again, the second set, where he had swung the town truck around in the turnaround at the end of the Beaver Meadow crossroad and come back.

I could see where he had dropped the wing again on the return.

He had done the left side going out and the right side coming back. Then he had done it all again. There was no other way to read it.

I thought about that for about four seconds and then I put it away, because the next mouth was coming up and it was a bad one.