All’s Well That Ends Well

Easily 18” of snow later, the saga continues. The plow was free of the frozen ground, but Jerry had been unable to budge it the last little distance to make final connection with the truck. It might as well have been a lawn ornament.

I feel confident no one is going to believe how this sodden, snowy story ends.

When I last journaled, my husband had just relayed to me the news that he had reached someone by phone, and in spite of the ongoing storm, we were amazed (flummoxed, to be honest) to hear they’d be here first thing in the morning.

My brain continued to insist there wasn’t a single plow within 50 miles that wasn’t working 24 hours a day, with a wait list of frantic people vying for a spot. How could this be?

So I asked Jerry who he had called, wondering how on earth he had managed to reach what had to be the sole available plow driver in the entire Mat-Su Valley. He wasn’t sure.

It seems he had gone online and Googled “Snowplow Services in Wasilla”. It was the logical place to start, although having anyone even answer their phone at 5pm in the middle of the heaviest single snowfall in 20 years (here in Alaska, at least) was unlikely at best.

But this is where God, Santa Claus or dumb luck (personally, I’m going with divine intervention 🙏) stepped in and guided Jer’s hand.

Of the long list of snowplow services out there, large and small, most of whom were not answering their phones at all, Jer managed to accidentally reach the owner of a “Parking Lot Plowing & Sanding” service. They don’t even do private driveways.

Chatterbox that my husband can be; he poured out the whole sad story, adding in being 70, diabetic and a traumatic brain injury survivor. The poor man probably would have promised anything to get Jer off the phone.

When Jer told the man where we lived, the miracle happened. This nice man told Jerry that although his business doesn’t do private driveways, he lives not far from us and would be driving right past our home on his way to the job he had lined up for the following morning.

He told Jer he would personally stop by and see if he could help Jerry get his plow hooked up. Jerry, in his excitement, never even asked the man’s name or wrote down the name of the business.

We went to bed that night tired and stressed, but with hopeful hearts.

In the morning (this would be Friday now), true to his word, the Parking Lot Plow Service owner showed up in his big, commercial plow truck. He make short work of clearing the end of our driveway, the berm of which had been starting to take on the dimensions of Denali, then pulled in behind our truck. Wonder of wonders, he’d even brought one of his employees along.

These two big, burly men had a short conversation with Jerry, then went right to work. With Jer inside the truck, working the plow levers, Scott (we know his name now 😉) and his helper manhandled the recalcitrant plow onto the receiver and locked it into place. It took the two of them about ten minutes.

When Jer came into the house, he was all smiles. He told me how they’d cleared the mountain at the end of the driveway and that the plow was up and running.

Then he told me he had asked what we owed them (a detail he’d neglected to ask the night before, but we’d agreed it didn’t matter. The need was great and we’d happily pay the piper).

Scott’s response to Jer’s query was, “Oh, no charge. We had to drive right by here anyway. Merry Christmas!”