Part One: Thirty-One Below
The cold snap hit the third week of January.
It came down out of Saskatchewan on a Tuesday night like a freight train. By Wednesday morning, the radio in Bismarck was saying thirty-one below on the farm roads east of Harvey. Fifty-five below with the wind. The kind of cold that freezes your nostrils shut on the first breath and makes your car door handle burn your bare fingers.
The kind of cold that kills people out here.
Mom didn’t answer her phone Wednesday evening.
I didn’t worry much at first. She’s eighty-two. She falls asleep in her chair watching Lawrence Welk reruns on the public station. Sometimes she leaves the phone in the bedroom and can’t hear it ring from the living room.
I called again at nine. Then at nine-thirty.
Nothing.
Thursday evening, she didn’t answer again.
I called six times. Seven. I called the Schmidts, her nearest neighbors, two miles down the gravel road. Their line was busy. I called again. Still busy.
I stood in my kitchen in Bismarck with my phone in my hand and my heart pounding.
My husband, Steve, drives a plow for Burleigh County. During a cold snap, they don’t come home. He’d been out since Tuesday afternoon, sleeping in the cab of his truck at the county shop between shifts, keeping the roads open.
I called him.
“Go,” he said. “I can’t get away. Take the Suburban. Fill the tank in Washburn. Take the emergency kit and the extra blanket. Call me when you get there.”
“Steve—”
“Go, Connie,” he said. “I’ll pray the whole way.”
So I drove out from Bismarck alone.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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