Scott Wyatt
The shuttle driver is older man, stocky, clean looking in that healthy Nordic-Minnesota way.
Retired after thirty years someplace, he took the job to fight boredom.
The extra cash doesn’t hurt, though most goes to his kid.
The route, ‘Marshall to Cottonwood’ is straight in a slightly curvy way.
The route is easy, and the driver is a careful sort.
It’s a road across the prairie, about thirteen miles, a quick trip unless bad weather.
Unlike many places, our weather determines what kind of day we’re going to have.
On the prairie, our weather can bring snow and rain, even high winds, all of it can closes roads.
That whipped up snow becomes a thick white blanket you can’t see through.
On the prairie, the paved roads have these ‘road closed’ arm things.
It reminds me of a skeleton arm. It’s a warning to stop.
I’ve made this trip several times.
Today, I’m the only passenger and the driver and I talk a bit.
Last week, he told me that his hobby was restoring Model T cars, “real cars, not models.”
It was something his brother and he used to do together. His brother passed on and he doesn’t do it as much anymore.
I ask about his cars-he has several.
He said that he hasn’t done much this winter. The parts are expensive. He found some tires in the “cities”, but the freight was fifty dollars.
His friend is driving up there next week for something so maybe he can save the freight if his buddy would pick them up.
His cell phone rings, plain old fashion rings, fancy tones wouldn’t fit him. It’s a driver who can’t find an address in, “Lynd”.
My driver gives directions in a confident manner:
“…go past the short gravel road, over the big bridge, past the new house with
the horses in front. The address is on your left…”
I like his directions. It’s directions that fit this rural country I live in.
Half listening, I look out the window at the passing fields. Here and there is the occasional oasis of bare trees surrounding the farmhouses and outbuildings. Each farmstead has a story going back a hundred years or more.
It must have been extremely rough settling this land.
The country is open, wide, the prairie horizon meeting the sky off in the distance.
The brownish, black earth is a fitting match to the grayish sky today.
This month, we’ve been having snow off and on but last night or sometime early this morning, it rained. A light rain, not drizzle but enough that you could call it rain.
There’s enough on the ground that puddles have formed in those, “cursed”, low spots in the fields. It’s our first rain in a while.
A few days ago, we had a snowstorm come in a dump a couple of inches. Seeing the rain makes me hope that winter is over. It’s the end of March, so maybe. There are still patches, long, thin, unbroken lines of white in the ditches here and there but it will probably be gone soon.
We get to my destination; I thank the driver. He tells me someone will be back at 4 to pick me up. I step down the stairs, and the door shuts silently behind me. There is a certain cold damp feeling in the air, makes me think Winter is not done with our prairie.