The snow’s still coming down at a crazy pace. Although, I went out the other night to work on the snowmobile ramp and it let up for a couple hours. By morning it was a full-on blizzard. I can’t survive here until spring. I only have enough wood for a few weeks, and food for about twice that long at my current starvation-level diet. What’s going to run out first is the light. I get a little from the fire when I leave the doors open, and there’s a faint blue glow from the upper windows during the day, but with a few more feet of snow I think it will be as dark as a cave in here. I’m saving the candles for then. I’m also going to need a way to get fresh air in here. The fire is sucking up all the oxygen. I’m considering punching a hole through the metal roof on the back part of the house.
I would do anything for a view of the horizon, or the night sky, or even just to look up at the clouds without seeing snow. I read somewhere that people need to be able to un-focus their eyes and look at something far off. They need to be able to do that every so often so they can relax. I believe it’s true. I don’t know how those researchers at the south pole manage to make it through a single winter. If the snow ever stops I’m going to climb up high enough so I can see something so far away I can’t tell what it is, you know? I’m sick of only seeing things close. Everything’s so close. Only the fire seems infinite. I stare at it for hours some nights, like it was the best TV show ever made. I stare at it and think of nothing at all.
BRAD WORKED ON his list for four days before he finally left the house. The snow stopped a week earlier. It switched to freezing rain in the middle of the night, layering his jacket in crunchy ice before he got back inside. In the morning, he cursed the rain. It made his snowmobile ramp into a treacherous sheet of ice.
Before the rain, his ramp was packed down by countless trips through with the shovel, and bolstered with pieces of plywood layered down. The ramp led up from the front porch up to the surface of the snow. Where he’d stopped shoveling and laying plywood, you could sink into the drifts like quicksand. You really needed to swim more than walk, he’d found out. He also found he could keep the snowmobile afloat in the fresh powder if he was careful. His snowmobile was light, long, and powerful—built for breaking trails—but he usually rode established trails. Riding in the fresh snow required a lot of effort and a lot of standing.
His education began when he took the machine out into snow about ten feet deep. As soon as he left the ramp, he thought the sled would be lost forever. He almost rolled it over and couldn’t move it an inch. Brad eventually consulted a book from his library. He read it while perched on the side of the sled’s half-buried seat. Within a few hours, he wrestled the snowmobile back upright and cut a few trails through the yard. With the wind and continued snowfall, his tracks disappeared by the next day.
Now, the ice changed the whole equation. Brad tried to climb the ramp and slipped immediately. He spun as he fell and slammed his shoulder into the hard ice. He tried to chip through the it with his shovel and found it too thick to break up easily.
The top task on his list was to figure out a way to get the snowmobile up the ramp. The rest of the entries were items to pack for the trip.
The snowmobile took a day. Packing took the other three.
Over the years, Brad trained himself to find a quick solution instead of a perfect one. It was essential to staying profitable as a contractor. Most of the companies he worked for employed people who could engineer a really good long-term solution to their problems. The only issue was budget. Often, Brad found, a really good long-term solution to the problem was way outside the budget allowance for the project. And, Brad found, a lot of companies didn’t really need a good long-term solution, they just needed a cheap, short-term fix for a problem that would go away in the near future.
Of course, a lot of solutions took longer than anyone wanted to admit, but that was a different issue.
That’s how Brad made his money—he presented options. He evaluated the situation, figured out what the “right” solution should be, and also figured out what the “right now” solution could be. His clients paid him for that skill—the ability to see an imperfect solution which would fix a problem soon, rather than a perfect solution which would fix a problem eventually.
When trying to free his snowmobile from the porch and get it up the icy ramp, Brad almost fell into that perfect solution trap. His first approach consisted of melting grooves in the sheet of ice to line up with the tracks of the snowmobile. Then, as he tried to climb the ramp, the bumps in his snowmobile tracks would interface with the grooves in the ramp, and he could climb. It was a perfect solution which would be durable, repeatable, and take forever to complete. Brad abandoned the idea quickly.
His next idea was to use his chainsaw to cut through the ice. He didn’t know how well it would work, but he’d seen ice sculptors use chainsaws before, so it seemed plausible. Unfortunately, his chainsaw disappeared when his garage exploded in mud.
Brad returned to the ice ramp with a sledgehammer and a lot of aggression. By the end of the day he’d broken up enough patches of ice to get traction to the top of the ramp. He left the snowmobile parked on a flat spot in the snowfield.
The day was overcast with low clouds, but without the falling snow, he could finally see more than ten feet. Brad looked back at the house and gaped at the sight. Only the peak of the roof at the front, and the peak of the garage were visible. The rest of the house was a white mound of nothing. It was only a guess, but Brad figured the snow to be at least twenty feet deep if not more.
“Jesus,” he said, exhaling.
As slippery as the ramp was, the ice up on the flat wasn’t so hard to navigate. The freezing rain left the surface bumpy, like the individual drops froze before they could spread out too much. Brad walked up to the peak of his roof and saw that hot air from his chimney created a bubble beneath the snow. The top of it was still open, but if the snow continued it might close up, suffocating Brad’s fire.
On the edges of his clearing, some trees poked out of the top of the snow, but most were just more white mounds. In some directions, the view looked like rolling dunes in a pure-white desert.
Brad hauled his essentials up the ramp by hand and lashed them to the snowmobile. He wore a lot of his food provisions on his back in a hiking pack. In the morning he didn’t bank the fire, but instead left a note for the next person who might find his house.
He set out at dawn, or at least as early as he could see clearly.
CHAPTER NINE
Maine / New Hampshire Border - FALL
ROBBY LET OUT a long, slow sigh. He turned around and sat on the center console so he could look back at the wrecks behind him. Behind the Wyoming trailer with the bucking bronco, Robby saw the corner of the boy’s car in the distance. Robby wondered if the boy’s face had slipped farther down the window, or if the boy’s hand still perched in the same position, or if it had mysteriously moved again.
His stare didn’t shift, but his hands found a box of cheesy crackers from the back seat. Robby crunched them by the handful while he considered his options. He could replace one flat with the spare, but did it matter? Would changing just one tire even help?