Chapter 43: Detour - Bridge Out

When we woke and found that the blizzard had blown itself out, we all rushed outside, then for several minutes, pandemonium had reigned as snowballs flew and we all expressed our relief. Eight very young people confined in a house for three days had been a trying situation.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t lived through a raging blizzard while being isolated can understand what even a short period of confinement in close quarters can do to people. Nor would they know the feeling of elation that rushed through us that day when we were again able to go outside in relative safety. I think the youth and energy of our group was also a factor. Confining several emotion laden young people in a small space for three days was a near explosive situation. Thankfully four of us were well on our way toward adulthood and had managed to maintain some control of the situation.

Once everyone was outside and felt the freedom of fresh air, some of the excess emotions and over abundant energy just had to be burned off. Everyone grew loud and boisterous, then handfuls of snow started to fly as several of us tried to make snowballs using snow that was just too cold to clump into a ball. Soon we were creating a mini blizzard or our own, but it was mostly done in fun.

At one point though, I noticed that John was being smothered in a very lopsided snowball fight. It seemed that each of the younger girls was out to let him know that by cooperating they had him at their mercy. I think he was near panic when I called them off. At that point they had him on his back in a snow drift and were threatening to fill his britches with snow in order to cool him down. Up until then I don’t think he had actually realized that his previous actions had been bothering anyone much. From the look on his face though, I could see that it had sunk in when he’d been almost buried in the snowbank. I kept an eye on him afterward and saw that he was being a lot more thoughtful and considerate to the girls than before, so I put my worries on that score aside for the time being.

After only a short time, being outside and fooling around in the snow seemed to pall for everyone, yet we wanted to do something besides hang around the house. I didn’t get any arguments when I suggested that we eat breakfast, then tackle digging out and finding what we needed to do to re-establish some order in our lives. For one thing, I wanted to try to get the younger girls back to school and Lucille back to her job just as soon as possible.

I was standing on the porch and Sandy came up the steps to stand at my side as everyone trooped back indoors after beating and brushing themselves clean of snow.

“Did you want something?” I asked her.

“Unh huh. Just a second,” Sandy said very quietly as we waited for Jess and Jean, to follow the others inside.

“You guys coming in or not?” Jean asked.

“In a bit. You go ahead,” Sandy waved at her.

“What’s up?” I asked Jean grinned as she waved a hand and closed the door behind her.

“Nothing really. I just wanted to be with you and away from everyone else for a bit,” she sighed. “I think the cabin is going to be lovely when it’s all done, but it needs doors with locks on the bedrooms. With six other people in the house besides us, it was starting to feel small and crowded.”

“Oh,” I chuckled. “Well, I’ve bought and paid for the doors, but they haven’t come in yet. The lumber yard has them on order though.”

“Well, the thought counts for something I guess, but they aren’t doing us a darn bit of good wherever they are,” she laughed and wrapped an arm around me.

“Should I get a couple of gate hinges and a piece of plywood to put up on the bedroom doorway tonight then?” I kidded her.

“Only if this goes on much longer,” she chortled, then stepped away and punched me. “Let’s go out to the barn and see the horses while the others make breakfast.”

So I stuck my head inside the door to tell the others we were off to the barn for a few minutes. Then we waded through the snow to see how the horses and cattle in the main barn had fared overnight. Sandy really wasn’t that interested in them; what she wanted was to snuggle close while no one else was around.

“It’s just not the same with so many people around watching our every move,” she sighed, wrapped tightly in my arms. “Don’t you feel crowded?”

“Yeah, but I’ve felt crowded ever since Matt and John moved into the cabin,” I grinned at her and kissed her nose. “If anything, having you gals around has taken some of the pressure off of me.”

“How can you possibly say that?”

“Easy, I haven’t had to dig everyone up little jobs all the time. Instead everyone has been working like beavers at anything we did, just so no one would be bored. We’ve done a lot of labour intensive crud in the last few days.”

“Well, it was either that or kill each other,” Sandy laughed. “The four Js were about driving me nuts.”

“The four Jays? Oh, you mean Jasmine, John and your sisters? I didn’t notice them being all that bad.”

“That’s because you and Matt would go out at the same time. That’s when they’d raise hell.”

“Well, you could have said something to us.”

“I was going to ... this morning, but the blizzard had eased off, so I’m telling you now.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “I guess we’d better go eat, then we can start digging our way out of this mess. The sooner we get started, the faster you can all go back to town.”

“Well, if it was just you and I, I wouldn’t mind sticking around, but the girls need to be in school and Lucille has her job.”

I just nodded and took her hand to head back to the house.

Digging out was not an easy task. That first morning, I took my new snowmobile and surveyed the job ahead of us. The level portions were relatively easy, but some of the areas on the grade climbing out of the valley were drifted full of snow and I knew that they were going to be tough to clear. The problem wasn’t getting at the snow; getting rid of it was the tough part. The worst problem was that the deepest drifts were in the narrowest sections of the roadway.

Luckily we had brought Dad’s little D4 Caterpillar tractor up to the ranch to backfill all the trenches and level the soil around the new construction. Since it ran on crawler tracks, snow wasn’t a problem, and since we’d mounted the front end scoop to handle soil, it was set up fairly well for snow. The only problem was that after a short time on that old seat, the driver was cold as blazes. To keep the operator warm we devised a heater with a few pieces of wood bolted to the hood as spacers, then a small canvas tarp, which redirected the warm air from the engine back to the operator’s seat. The wood kept the tarp away from moving parts and the tarp was tied down tightly, so it wouldn’t get into anything.

Because that old cat rode so rough and since I also had the old International tractor with a front-end loader on it, we split up. Matt took over the job of clearing the road, but John was willing to give him a break, so they planned to take turns driving the crawler. Meanwhile, I got the old International started and began cleaning up around the yard and the corrals. The girls dug in and helped too, finding shovels and clearing areas I couldn’t get at, especially around the cabin and the vehicles.

Both my pickup and my Jeep started easily, but Lucille’s car and mine were a different matter. They seemed to dislike the cold and the battery in her car was low. I tried boosting the car, but it still didn’t want to start, so I told her we’d charge the battery and plug in her block heater as soon as we had hydro. As for my car, I wasn’t too worried. It could sit for a while. Besides, there was nowhere to drive anyway because the road up the hill was still blocked by deep drifts.

Even with everyone working on the task, it took most of three days to reach the section of road that the hydroelectric company had plowed in order to be able to repair their downed power line. We’d known they’d plowed the road even before we got the ranch road completely clear, because our power came on during the second afternoon of the calm spell. The telephone started to ring not much later.

Once the power was on, I’d plugged in an extension cord to connect Lucille’s car’s block heater and had also put her battery on charge. Then in the morning, once we got the engine started, I had John put the chains that I’d bought for my car on Lucille’s rear tires. That way we were almost ready to leave by the time the road was clear, and it wasn’t long before we were on our way to town. I lead the way in the pickup with Sandy and Jasmine riding along, while Lucille followed in her car with the twins, as well as Matt and John as passengers. Once we were down to the main road, I swung right to take Jasmine home, but instead of following me, Lucille turned left and headed straight for town. I wasn’t worried by that, although there was snow on the road, it wasn’t deep and what was there hadn’t turned to ice yet from heavy traffic.

We dropped Jasmine off at Uncle Tom’s house, then went home and saw my folks for a short while before we followed Lucille toward town. Once Sandy was dropped off at her house, I picked up the guys and headed downtown. They wanted some better winter clothing, and I wanted both groceries and fuel for the tractors. However, we didn’t want to waste time because it would be dark soon, so we wanted to be back at the ranch to do the chores. I was feeling edgy too, probably a bit worried because we were all away and if another storm blew in, there’d be no one there to look after things.

It turned out that I needn’t have worried. We were back in time to do the chores at last light, then I cooked supper, which felt strange since there were no girls around. That evening, the cabin felt empty with only the three guys there and my bed felt even emptier.

The next day, early in the afternoon, Dad and Mom showed up with all on the interior doors in the back of Dad’s pickup and they were followed by Mark Jackson, the surveyor who’d been working for the Hydro Electric Company in the summer. Dad had hired him to see how much trouble it would be to run in a road between our places on our own land or else find a way to climb the cliffs on a road that wouldn’t drift in so badly. I felt he was throwing money away, but reserved judgement. Besides, I thought the winter was a stupid time to do any surveying.

I was wrong.

Mark wanted to do the job after a blizzard like the one we’d just had so he could see the drift patterns of the snow. He didn’t plan to spend a lot of time surveying, he was just assessing the job in the winter so his work in the spring would be based on what he’d seen beforehand. That idea did make sense to me.

So Mark stayed with us for two days and I lent him my snowmobile to get around. At the end of those two days, he handed me a sketch of the cliff and the hillside above it. The sketch illustrated that if I planted several hedges of drought tolerant bushes or temporarily put up snow fences along the lines he’d drawn on the map, I’d break up the drift pattern of snow. He thought the hedges would cut the deposited drifts by as much as seventy-five percent. Then if I could raise the road surface by cutting a ditch on each side that was at least four feet wide and two feet deep and use the soil from the ditches as fill to raise the road surface I’d be able to reduce that even more. He threw around figures in the range of seventy to eighty percent less drifting for the majority of the worst areas.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I stared at him in astonishment.

“Nope. If you go up on the edge of the plateau above the valley, you can see how the trees are shaped by the wind. It must blow through here from the west or else the northwest most of the time.”

I nodded, but didn’t say a word.

“Okay, then all you need to do is put up a break to that wind and make it either lift or slow down. Hedges along those lines will do that and if you put in an application with the District Agriculturist, and show him this drawing, he’ll be able to get you a discount to buy ‘Caragana’ plants from Bowden Nurseries. You’ll have to pick them up and plant them yourself, but they won’t cost a lot. In fact looking at the amount of snow you had to move in the last few days, I think you’d pay for that cost in one winter,” Mark grinned. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I think I just talked myself out of a cushy job in the spring.”

“Oh, I think Dad still wants you to have a look at the drop off with the idea of running a road down it,” I shrugged. “He seems to think we need a secondary route, just in case.”

“Well, to be honest, I looked at that job too. The grade is really too darn steep. The terrain must drop more than five hundred feet in less than two or three thousand. That’s darn steep terrain to run any kind of road on. It could be done, but a lot of soil and rock would have to be moved and that would mean blasting in some areas, Even then there’d probably need to be a switchback or two in the road to keep the grades down to anything reasonable.”

“Don’t tell me, tell Dad,” I lifted my hands as if to ward him off and grinned. “He’s the one with the bee in his bonnet.”

“Yes, I’d best go talk to him now,” he laughed as he headed for his pickup. “Thanks for the use of your snowmobile and the place to stay. When you get it done, this house is going to be great.”

Within the hour of Mark leaving us, a chinook arch appeared on the horizon. Two hours later the temperature had risen from deep freeze to full melt. Then an hour after that, Sandy, Jess and Jean drove down the hill in a year old Jeep Wagoneer. It looked like a station wagon, seemed twice as big as my old CJ5, and although it was only three years newer, it made mine look ancient.

“What do you think of my new car?” Sandy bubbled as she bounced out of driver’s door and threw her arms around me in a hug. “Frank hunted it up for me so I could come visit you every weekend.”

“That’s great. And your car looks nice, but darn expensive.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” she laughed and wriggled against me. “You’re holding a working woman. I’m Frank’s new secretary/receptionist, so I got the Jeep at his cost.”

She took a deep breath then and her expression sobered.

“The insurance on Dad’s car came through, so the Js and I wanted something that would be comfortable, but had four wheel drive. Whether you know it or not, we love it out here,” Then she changed the subject. “And what have you been doing for excitement?”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know that the bedroom has a door,” I grinned. “On top of that, Mark Jackson, the surveyor, was out here for a few days and he showed me a possible method to control the drifting on the road down the hill.”

“Oh, how would you do that?”

So, I took her inside to show her the drawings that Mark had left with me and showed her the other work we’d done around the house. In the three days she and the girls had been away, we’d not only put doors on the bedrooms, but we had the upper floor of the addition almost finished. All the painting was done. The tiles were all installed on the walls of the upstairs bathrooms and we’d even whipped together bed frames for the beds in the spare bedrooms. They were awkward to move around, but they were functional. We’d set one bedroom up for John to stay in, because although he’d never had a room of his own before, he found he liked being by himself. That way we could start to work on the farm office where he had been sleeping.

The next two days were great. Lucille showed up on Saturday morning and stayed until Sunday night, which made Matt quite happy. Yet, for some reason I felt that the girls all seemed slightly reserved, almost as if they were waiting impatiently for something to happen. The only time they relaxed was when Tom showed up and spent the evening with us on Saturday night, but everything quieted down again after he’d left. When Lucille went back to town, the twins went with her, but Sandy stayed behind for an extra night. It was after we went to bed that I found out the reason.

“Chris, we’ve got to talk,” she said as she snuggled against me.

For some reason a chill ran down my spine, but I think I managed to hide it. Instead I hugged her close and kissed her forehead since she was snuggled so tight against me that I couldn’t reach much else.

“I’m listening. Just what do you want to talk about?”

“Well, you know I’ve been on the pill since early this spring, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And, I’ve been taking it faithfully every darn day.”

“Okay.”

“Well, my period is more than three weeks late, so I went to see Dr. McGraths about it on Friday morning. Neither he, nor the doctors in Calgary warned me, but some of the medications I was on after the accident could have affected the pill. Now, there isn’t anything positive yet, but I could be pregnant. Dr. McGraths sent off a blood sample and we’ll know in a week or two, but he did warn me that all the trauma I’ve gone through in the last while could cause me to miss a period,” she sniffed and seemed to try to snuggle even closer. “Now you might get annoyed at this, but if I am pregnant, I’m not trying to force you to marry me. Instead, I want to wait. I love you, but I don’t want you to feel forced to marry me or anyone else.”

“Now wait a minute,” I growled, getting annoyed despite trying to hold my temper. “If I got you pregnant and you have a kid, I want to be that kid’s father.”

“Oh, I’d never try to prevent that,” she sniffed. “I think you’ll be a great daddy one day. A lot better than mine ever was. I just don’t want to have what my Mom and Dad wanted to have happen come to pass. I refuse to insist that you marry me if I am pregnant.”

“And what if I want to marry you anyway?” I chortled, seeing a funny side to all of this. “Besides, if you are pregnant and I didn’t marry you, I’d look like a schmuck. You need to realize right now that the woman who’s in my bed is not the same ditsy teenager that I took out on a date in June. In the last four months you’ve changed a tremendous amount.”

“I know that,” she sniffled, then lifted her head and tried to smile through her tears. “I also know that you still have a thing for Carissa and she feels the same way about you.”

“What?” I stared at her.

“Oh she does, but she has Jackie too.”

“Hell, I’ve hardly seen Carissa since the accident,” I snorted.

“Oh, Chris,” Sandy sighed heavily. “Carissa thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread and to be honest, so does Jackie.”

Then she broke into a grin. “You seem to have that effect on women. Look at poor Lucille.”

“Lucille?” I frowned at her. “Lucille is jumping Matt’s bones.”

“Not hardly,” Sandy laughed aloud. “They haven’t had sex. They just cuddle.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Unh uh. Matt knows she’s carrying a torch for you and although he’d love to ask her to marry him, she made it plain that he’s got no chance of that. So, since he’s so strongly religious, they aren’t doing anything except letting their fingers do the walking. However, Lucille chose that way to do things rather than sleep with you anymore. She’s still hung up on the incest thing, even though she knows that biologically, she isn’t related to you.”

All I could do was stare at her. I really didn’t know what to say.

“Now, that’s three more reasons why I don’t want to force you to marry me,” she sighed softly.

“Look, I like all three of them, but I feel a lot more comfortable and a lot closer to you,” I sighed then. “Besides, I’m one of those guys who feels obligated to marry a girl if I got her pregnant.”

“Well, if I’m pregnant, you’ve got a problem then,” she broke into giggles.

“What do you mean?”

“Jackie is definitely pregnant and while Carissa loves her to pieces, she’s also jealous as hell.”

“Oh migawd,” I groaned. “But Jackie and I only...”

“Unh huh, I know. You were golfing.”

“I was golfing?”

“Yep, you got a hole in one,” she giggled again. “At least with me, you took your time and played the whole course.”

“Sandy, this is not funny.”

“I know, but I’ve got to laugh or else I’ll cry,” she kissed me then. “You know the strange thing is that what Mom wanted is happening, only it’s not in BC with old men. It’s here in Alberta with a young stud.”

“Jeez, what am I going to tell my folks? Mom warned me to use condoms.”

“You don’t even have to tell her. She knows already.”

“What?”

“Unh huh. Jackie and Carissa told her when they were stuck down there during the blizzard. Jackie didn’t want to tell you, but when I talked to your Mom today in the doctor’s office, she suggested that I tell you about both of us.”

“Mom knows?”

“Unh huh, and I don’t think she’s really upset either. In fact she hugged me so tight I thought I’d burst.”

“Oh cripes,” I just shook my head.

“Oh by the way, you can’t say anything to Jackie yet, okay. She likes you a lot, but she loves Carissa and the Coulters. John and Wilma have promised her that they’ll treat her baby like it was their grandchild and will support her just as if she was one of their own girls,” Then Sandy got very serious. “The unfortunate thing is going to be the fact that the gossips around town are going to go crazy, especially if I’m pregnant too.”