The Night the School Gym Opened

The second day

The storm didn’t break.

I’d thought it would. The forecast had said clearing by Tuesday noon, and it was Tuesday noon, and the wind was still driving the snow in long white ropes across Main Street. The plows couldn’t hold the interstate, with the drifts re-forming faster than they could cut them.

So the gym kept going.

Bev Sandvig ran the kitchen like a ship. She had fed forty people eggs and sausage at six, and by ten o’clock she had a pot of chili the size of a washtub going for noon. A church woman brought fourteen pies. Someone’s husband came with a snowblower to clear the school lot, and stayed to play cribbage with an Iowa driver for the rest of the afternoon.

The drivers began to work, because they could not stand to sit.

A Texas man with a gray ponytail took the mop out of my hands the first time I tried to wipe up spilled coffee. “Ma’am,” he said, “you’ve been on your feet for sixteen hours. Sit down.” The Georgia driver took the dish crew. The two Ohio drivers shoveled the front walk three times.

By noon, a few of them were showing the shop class how to chain up a tractor wheel, because Mr. Kolb, the shop teacher, had a flatbed in the lot and nowhere else to go.

I called the young woman from Missouri to ask whether her trailer unit still had fuel. She laughed.

“Honey, a fire department truck came out at midnight and fueled all forty rigs from the county tank. Gordon Gunderson’s idea. They weren’t supposed to, but they did.”

I hadn’t known. I stood there in the hallway of Alder School with the phone against my ear, and I started to cry.

Not because it was sad. It was just so much, all at once.

Mark came in at four that afternoon.

He had been on the plow for twenty-six hours. He walked through the gym door looking like a man who had been carried out of a snowdrift, with his eyebrows white with frost and his beard crusted at the edges.

He stopped just inside, and he looked at the rows of cots and the pie table and the Georgia man teaching a first grader to tie a bowline.

“Nicole,” he said. “What is all this?”

“I opened the gym.”

“I can see that.”

“Dwight closed the truck stop.”

“I heard.” He took off his gloves one finger at a time. “It came over the radio. Gordon called it in. I’ve been listening to the whole town on channel four for two days, trying to figure out how to get here.”

“Where were you?”

“Cattle,” he said. “Eighty head of Dahlgren’s, loose on the highway. We got them back in at eleven last night.” He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

“You were doing what the county needed.”

“Dwight is my cousin.”

“I know.”

Mark looked at the room for a long time.

“I’m going to have a talk with him,” he said. “Not tonight. But I’m going to.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do.” He sat down heavily on the lowest bleacher. “Nicole, I’m so proud of you I can’t see straight.”

Then he put his head against my shoulder and slept sitting up for an hour and ten minutes, and I let him.