I hadn’t used a snowblower in years—not since my dad taught me as a kid—and it took a while to figure out how to turn it on. It was one of those massive push snowblowers, just like my dad’s, but rusting in several places. The previous owners of our house sold it to us for two hundred dollars, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time to make sure it was operational. Mercifully, it turned on after a few attempts and I awkwardly worked to steer it from the shed to the driveway. I was grateful no one could see me for this project. My plan was to drive a straight line out to the road and back again, three, maybe four times, until there was a wide enough lane for our car to drive through. Our driveway was long, so it wouldn’t be easy, but it wouldn’t be impossible either.
At first, things seemed to work pretty well. I loved the razor-sharp cut that the machine made through the snow, revealing distinct layers from each storm we’d had, like a sliced geode. The problem was traction. I had big, warm snow boots on that kept slipping out from under me as I worked to push the heavy rig forward. I wished I’d thought to buy crampons or even just dig up some old soccer cleats. To compensate for my lack of torque, I had to rock the machine back and forth when it stopped to propel it forward again. This worked until I’d nearly reached the road, the section where our driveway tilted up at a slight angle. In the car, it was just a little bump, but it was too much for me to push the snowblower over. I stood there, gripping the handles of the roaring blower while I looked around for a solution. Snow was falling in a dense curtain before my eyes, leaving flakes to melt on my lashes and cheeks. Finally, I saw a small log, nearly covered in snow, just to my right. I left the blower in place while I retrieved the log and pressed it into the ground at my feet. I was going to use the log to press my boot against it while I pushed the blower up and over the hump. After a few stomps, the log was secure and I prepared to heave the machine forward. With a forceful thrust, the snowblower took a satisfying leap and it seemed for a moment that we might crest the bump. But just as the snowblower neared the top, I ran out of strength. My muscles quivered in overexertion. The machine stopped moving and then began rolling back toward me. There was no time to think. I stepped back, hoping to find the log with my toe, but it wasn’t there. Before I could pull my body entirely out of the way, the blower was rolling into my chest. It jammed one long handle into a lung, knocked the wind out of me and ran directly over my left foot.
I fell onto my back, stunned at first, and then overwhelmed by a hot, rushing pain in my foot. It hurt too much to move, so I craned my neck around to see that the blower had rolled past me and tipped over into the snowbank. The whirring and clanking of its ancient motor was trailing off as the stalled beast went back to its dormant state. I was safe from it, but in excruciating pain. I moaned and then gasped as it occurred to me that not only was my foot likely broken, but my cell was inside and there was no one around to help me. I could die there in my driveway, so close to my warm, glowing house. I let my head fall back into the snow and watched the cold flakes rush toward me.
For a fleeting instant, it seemed more comfortable to just let death wash over me. But as my thoughts came into focus, I realized that I wasn’t likely going to die from a broken foot—not immediately anyhow—and I needed a plan. I rolled onto my stomach and began to crawl along my neatly sheared path toward the house. The flat walls of snow on either side kept me hidden from the rest of the world; I was an animal burrowing back to my cave. At the rate I was going, it would have taken about ten painful minutes to crawl back to the house. My foot was throbbing, but pain was now also coming from my wet, freezing knees that were doing all the work.
I hadn’t gotten very far when I saw car lights reflecting against the trees ahead. Instinctively, I pulled myself up onto my working right foot, spun around and waved my hands wildly like someone stranded on a desert island. A red pickup whizzed down the hill and then stopped just past my driveway. The scruffy young man behind the wheel rolled down his window and lifted his chin, as if that alone asked the question.
“I’m hurt,” I yelled, which sounded pathetic, but it was all I could summon. “Can you take me to the hospital?”
“Hop in,” the man said.
I hobbled a few steps down the driveway, pushing through the portion of snow that the blower never reached and wincing all the way. The guy in the truck watched for a while and finally jumped out of the driver’s seat to reluctantly help me in. He was matter-of-fact about the operation, and so I did my best not to seem too wimpy, but Jesus Christ, it hurt. Once we were moving again, I nervously told him the story of what had happened, vaguely sensing that later, when the pain subsided, I would feel deep embarrassment at my inability to execute a small snow-removal task. But I had no energy for embarrassment then.
The man, who must have been in his early twenties, didn’t seem terribly interested in my injury. He explained that he’d been working on a big second-home construction up the hill when the contractor finally let them go for the day. Now he needed to get back to his girlfriend’s house in time to get snowed in with her instead of his own parents.
“This snow’s too deep for that old piece of shit, you know,” he said. Apparently, he had taken notice of the snowblower I left on its side. “You gotta get a bigger rig or find someone with a truck plow for your driveway. I’m surprised that thing’s even running still. I haven’t seen one of those in years.”
This information made me feel slightly less incompetent. I asked him what kind of snowblower I should buy and nodded my head as he gave me incredibly specific advice about motors and tire gauge options. He was just killing time, in a hurry to get rid of this weird injured guy before getting trapped inside with his girlfriend. I imagined that this girlfriend was new to him, based on his urgency. She was probably pretty enough, but also tough in the way country girls can be. My foot was throbbing and, over the course of the ten-minute drive, I thought I might pass out. I wanted this guy to keep talking, to tell me about snowplows and girlfriends and whatever else he was saying while I tried to focus on his words and ignore the pain.
Finally, he pulled up to the very small medical facility that served as a hospital for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t drive to the closest real hospital ninety minutes away. It looked like a giant cinder block and, on that night, the cinder block appeared to be closed.
“Okay, man, good luck,” my driver said.
I sat there for a moment, confused about what to do. There was still no sign of life from inside the hospital and this guy wanted to leave me on the doorstep. It was dark now and snow was falling even faster than before. I don’t know what I was envisioning for the drop-off, but I had at least hoped that he would help me wobble inside. Instead of freezing to death in my driveway, it appeared that I would freeze to death on the sad front steps of this building. Maybe this guy knew that the hospital was closed, I considered, and he just wanted to dump me somewhere as part of a cruel trick. I sat silently in the cab of the truck for another moment.
Finally, a middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s cap peered out one of the windows and turned on a light. I let out a sigh of relief and opened the car door, now eager to flee the truck. I slammed the door behind me and mumbled a thank-you after it was too late for him to hear. The front door of the hospital swung open and the nurse and an older man came to meet me. They were wearing scrubs on top, with jeans and snow boots below. As they helped me inside and into a wheelchair, I felt an overwhelming wave of gratitude wash over me. Lights flicked on around us as we wheeled down a hall toward an examination room that could just as well have been for farm animals.
I don’t remember most of what happened in that room until the moment at which the pain medication kicked in and my head cleared. Both people (doctors? nurses? I didn’t know) were down near my bare foot with a glaring light above them. They murmured and nodded to one another until finally standing up straight and looking at me. By this point, I was sure amp
utation was inevitable.
“You’re looking at several stress fractures in your forefoot and toes,” the man said casually.
“Stress fractures?” I asked, disappointed by the mild sound of the term. “There’s nothing broken? It really hurts.”
“Breaks, fractures—same thing in this case,” he said. “These small foot breaks can hurt like hell, but there isn’t much we can do. You will get some swelling and probably bruising...definitely more pain.”
The woman put her hand on my arm. “We’re going to give you a walking boot, one that you can take on and off, and we’ll tape some of your toes together. Can you stay off your feet for a couple weeks?”
I shrugged.
“Good,” the man said. “And we’ll give you two days’ worth of the painkillers, but that will suffice.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “So it will stop hurting soon?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, it will probably hurt for a while. You just have to be patient. Our bodies are very good at healing themselves if we give them the time and rest they need.”
I don’t know what I was hoping for, but a little more alarm over the suffering I had just endured would have been validating. I was familiar with this Yankee tough-it-out approach to first aid from my childhood, and I didn’t miss it one bit.
“Do you have someone you can call to come and get you?” the woman asked as she taped my toes.
And with that, a new wave of panic swept over me. I could probably get ahold of Pia, but whether she would come get me seemed an open question. There was almost two feet of fresh snow on the ground now, too, making it a logistical challenge. I had left the snowblower in our driveway, so I imagined a pissed-off Pia parking the car on the side of the road and walking along my skinny, plowed lane to the house. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might actually be worried.
The female doctor rolled my wheelchair up to a flesh-colored rotary phone and I dialed Pia’s cell. It rang three times before her voice-mail message came on. I don’t know why I didn’t leave a message, but the sound of her voice mail sent me into such a fury that I couldn’t bear to. Either she was still out with her prepper friends, or she had returned to the disturbing driveway scene. Either way, she hadn’t thought to leave her fucking cell phone on in the middle of a blizzard. I returned the receiver to the phone and looked up at the two nice people standing in front of me. Perhaps they were in a rush to get to their girlfriends’ houses, too. My head still felt foggy with pain and pills.
“I don’t really have anyone to call,” I said. “I recently moved here and my wife is unavailable. I don’t know... I don’t know what people do in this situation...when they need someone to come...but there isn’t anyone.”
I knew how sad it all sounded, but I didn’t have the will to pretend not to be melancholy. I didn’t have anyone to call. My wife was too busy with her new obsessions to wonder where I’d been and, while I certainly had acquaintances in Isole, I didn’t have any close friends. I didn’t know what their lives were like and certainly didn’t feel comfortable calling them and asking them to drive into a storm to get me.
My shoulders slumped. I opened my palms out on my thighs as if to surrender to these perfectly nice doctor-like people who had succeeded at making me feel like the most alone person on earth.
“We all need to get home fast, before there’s too much snow,” the man said. “Libby and I are going west on sixteen, which doesn’t do you any good, Ash.” I wondered how he knew my name and my address. He went on, “But my daughter lives right up the road from you, and she’s on her way home from work now. I’ll see if she can swing by here to give you a lift.”
I sat in my wheelchair while calls were made and someone’s daughter was instructed to pick me up. The man and woman bustled around, turning off lights and returning medical instruments to drawers. It was called a hospital, but it filled a uniquely rural role that was more like urgent care. These doctors were here to tend to what could be fixed on-site and send the serious problems to Dartmouth or Burlington. They braved the snow as necessary, and the entire enterprise relied on their judgment and tire treads. It’s a startling deficiency to someone unfamiliar with rural America, but you forget that with time. I was still alarmed by the idea as I sat helpless with my bright blue medical boot in my wheelchair.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t been in a hospital or even seen a doctor in years. Weren’t adults supposed to have things checked and measured now and then? It sounded right, but I hadn’t gotten around to such maintenance. I grew up in a household that stressed the curative powers of fresh air and a stiff upper lip; if you weren’t vomiting or registering a fatal temperature, you were going to school. I carried that toughness with me into adulthood and it had, thus far, served me well. But as I sat in that lonely closing hospital, I realized what a luxury it was just to know that people are available to care for you at any moment, even if you never avail yourself of their services.
Finally, a set of headlights appeared in the turnabout and the three of us exited the building, me hobbling in my air cast and holding a plastic bag of pills and pamphlets. The man and woman helped me to the passenger side of a sporty old Saab, then said their goodbyes and hustled to their cars. I felt like an unwanted child being passed around from one adult to the next. I had no choice but to trust that this new grown-up would make sure I got home safely.
“Hi, I’m Maggie,” my driver said.
The interior car light was on just long enough for me to know that I found Maggie very attractive. She had reddish long hair peeking out of a colorful knitted hat. My mind was still jumbled from the pain of the accident and the strangeness of the day, but she seemed familiar to me.
“I’m Ash,” I said, thinking I should make some gesture of gratitude, but not doing so.
Maggie pulled the car onto the empty road and followed the tire marks of whoever drove ahead of us. It was difficult to see where we were going, but she had the confidence of someone who had memorized the curves of that route. She turned the high beams on and then off again when it was clear that they were no use in the dense snowfall.
“I remember you, Ash,” she said. “You’re the new guy from the town hall scuffle. So what did you do this time—wrestle a bear in the woods?”
Was that flirtatiousness? I couldn’t tell, but I did my best to muster some charm.
“Close,” I said. “A snowblower attacked me. It was a menace to the neighborhood and it had to be put down—but not without a nasty fight. I’m disfigured now, but it’s a small price to pay for future generations.”
She smiled and I felt pleased with myself.
Maggie took a cautious turn onto an even darker road and pulled her hat off. Then I remembered: she was the woman who’d carried the toddlers into the janitors’ closet after the gunshots. I hadn’t thought about her since then, but I remembered being impressed by her decisiveness. I also remembered how pretty she was. Maggie was probably in her early thirties, thin and sporty in that pink-cheeked unfussy way that outdoorsy New England girls are. It was a type that had always driven me wild, different from Pia’s overpowering sexiness, but bursting with optimism and confidence.
“How far up the hill do you live, Ash?” Maggie asked.
She couldn’t take her eyes from the snowy road, so I used the opportunity to take in her lightly freckled face and the long fingers that gripped the wheel. She was wearing snow pants and a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater. They could have been men’s clothes, the way they draped over her small chest and firm legs, and I didn’t mind the mystery of that at all.
“About two miles up,” I said, wishing she’d slow down to stretch out the drive. “I remember you, too, you know, from the town hall.”
Maggie nodded and smiled a little.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“I teach math at the high sch
ool,” she said, “and I coach the downhill ski team.”
I didn’t know anyone who did things like that. Our friends from New York all worked in the arts or media or public relations. We talked knowingly over brunch about font trends. Maggie’s was a world I knew nothing about.
She shrugged. “It’s not as sexy as graphic design, but I really love it. And it gives me time to write.”
She’s a writer! Suddenly, I wanted to ask her a thousand questions, but I tried to stay cool. I wondered, too, how she knew so much about me.
“So this snow must be great news to a ski coach,” I said.
Maggie sighed. “This snow? No. This is more than we need. The visibility is too low and we can’t keep up with the grooming. It feels weird to say, but this really is too much. This whole season, it’s been too much or too little. Very strange.”
“Yeah, it is weird,” I said, looking out the window. There was no one else on the road at seven o’clock. I wondered how Maggie would get home after she dropped me off.
Anticipating my concern, she said, “We probably shouldn’t be on the roads right now, but I live about a half mile up the hill from you, so this isn’t out of my way.”
She looked down at my foot. “Do you have someone who can take care of you while you recover?”
We Are Unprepared Page 14