Last Pass
They put out the winter route assignments last week, and I’ve got 31 again. Twenty-two years running. Nobody else bids on it. The younger guys think it’s because I like the overtime, and I let them think so.
County Road 31 goes up out of the valley, through the timber, and over Tamarack Pass, nine miles of switchbacks with a gate at the summit where the state maintenance takes over. My job on a storm night is to plow it up and plow it down, over and over, from about ten at night until the morning crew comes on. You drop the blade at the county shed, you raise it at the summit gate, you swing around in the turnaround, and you plow your way back down. It’s lonely, but I don’t mind that. The cab’s warm. The radio picks up a station out of Boise that plays old country after midnight. There are worse ways to spend a night.
First snow’s forecast for the passes on Thursday. So I’ve been thinking about it again.
The first time was the big storm of ‘04, the one that took down the power lines in three counties. It was coming down so hard I was plowing at walking speed with the wing out, and the snow was boiling up over the hood in the lights like surf. I got to the summit at about three in the morning, by the odometer and the feel of the grade, and I couldn’t see the gate.
That happens in a whiteout. You can’t see your own blade. I crept forward looking for the reflectors on the gateposts, and I kept on creeping, and they didn’t come, and after a while I understood I’d gone past where the gate ought to be, and the road was still going.
It went on, level, along what should have been the ridge. Fresh snow, deep, no tracks. And it was a road. My blade was scraping pavement. I could feel the grader seams under the tires. Every so often there was a reflector post at the edge. Every so often, a mailbox.
There are no houses on Tamarack Pass. I’d been driving it for two winters by then. There’s nothing up there but the gate and the state’s sand shed and a lot of lodgepole pine.
I couldn’t turn around. There was nowhere to turn. So I plowed. I don’t know how far. The mailboxes came every few hundred yards, on posts, the old rural kind with the little red flag on the side. I didn’t look at them much at first. Then I did.
They had names on them. Stick-on letters, hand-painted, one with a brass plate. I knew the names. Doris Fenwick, who’d run the café in town until she died in ‘97. Gene Albers, who I’d played football with, who’d rolled his truck on 31 the winter after we graduated. A family called the Ketchums who’d burned in a chimney fire when I was a boy. And mailbox after mailbox after that, names I half knew, names off of headstones in the cemetery behind the Grange. The red flags were all up.
My wing was throwing snow over them as I passed. I was burying them. That bothered me more than I can tell you.
After maybe twenty minutes, the road widened into a turnaround, and I swung around, and plowed my way back the way I’d come, and the gate’s reflectors came up out of the snow on the right side, where they ought to be, and I went down the mountain shaking like a dog. I told the supervisor I’d gone off the road at the summit and got lucky. He said take a couple days.
It happens on the worst night of every winter. Never the first storm. Never a small one. The big one, the one that shuts the schools and drops trees on the lines. I go up 31, and at the top the gate isn’t there, and the road goes on along the ridge.
It’s longer every year. I’ve timed it. The first year it was twenty minutes to the turnaround. Last winter, it was an hour and ten.
There are more mailboxes. I recognize more of them. That’s how it goes when you get older, I suppose, in a small place. My mother’s went up in ‘11. My brother’s in ‘16. My wife’s, Marjorie’s, the winter after she passed, a plain black one with her name painted in that careful hand of hers, the one she’d used on the kids’ lunch bags. I stopped the truck that first time I saw it. I sat there with the blade down and the engine running, and I didn’t get out.
I don’t think I’m supposed to get out.
But last winter I did.
It was the turnaround. It’s always the same: a wide circle cut in the timber, snow coming down through the lights, and on the far side of it, a single mailbox on its own. I’d never driven close enough to read it. Last winter I did, because the turnaround was smaller than it used to be, and I couldn’t swing wide enough to miss it.
It was mine. My name, stick-on letters, the same ones I’d put on the box at the end of my own driveway after Marjorie died, the same crooked R. The flag was up.
I sat there a long time. Then I put on my gloves and climbed down.
There was a single envelope inside. No stamp. My name on the front in a handwriting I’d know anywhere, because I’d learned to write from it. My father’s. He died in 1979, when I was nine, of a stroke, on a winter morning, out in our own driveway, with the snow shovel still in his hand.
The note inside said:
Don’t stop now. You’re doing fine. It’s an awful long way and we can’t any of us walk it in this. Keep it open for us, son. Keep it open for your mother and for Marjorie. When it’s your turn, somebody will keep it open for you.
I’ve thought about that note every day since. I keep it in the visor.
I don’t know where the road goes. I think about all those red flags up, and I think now that they weren’t waiting for mail. They were waiting for the plow. A flag up is how you say, out here, someone needs to come by.
I’d always thought I was burying them, throwing the snow over their boxes like that. I don’t think so anymore. I think I’m clearing the way. I think somewhere past the turnaround, every one of those boxes is at the end of a lane, and every lane goes to a house with its lights on, and they’re all of them waiting to be able to get out, or to get home, and none of them can do it on an unplowed road.
So I’ll bid on 31 again next year, and the year after that, for as long as they’ll let me drive. When the big storm comes I’ll go up and past the gate, and I’ll keep the road open for as long as it runs. I just wish I knew who’ll do it for me. The turnaround’s getting smaller every winter.
Last winter, as I was pulling away, I looked in my mirrors at my mailbox in the lights, and I saw that the flag had come down.