Photos by Tom Parker

Old Enough to Know Better
At 89, Anderson not ready to slow down

By Tom Parker

It’s a sunny winter afternoon and the temperature has risen to a few degrees above freezing. Besides the obvious relief it brings to people weary of arctic conditions, the temperature, as well as the radiant heat from the sun, brings several changes not only to the backroads of Washington County but to the snowpack as well.

“The ground isn’t frozen yet,” says Francis “Toby” Anderson. “Under that snow, it’s soft and wet. The snow’s harder, too. It’s started to freeze and it’s got a crust on it.”

We’re somewhere south and west of Washington, the road before us piled deeply on each side by drifts that have been hammered open. The road is still barely passable between the snowbanks, and strangely out of place on the Kansas prairies. It’s something you’d expect high in the Rockies where the roads are lined by 15-foot poles used to delineate the path of the road and the depth of the snow.

Inside the cab of the John Deere grader it’s cozy and warm. Looking out the front window at the road is like sighting down the barrel of a rifle, with the vast sweeping arms of the V-plow deeply notched like a front sight. Within the notch, the road rising and falling ever southward until it disappears over a wooded ridge.

Anderson points down the road.

“See that drift down there?” he asks.



What drift? All I see are drifts, drifts behind us and drifts ahead of us and drifts on each side, most of which reach at least to the level of the cab and a few even higher.

“That drift, on the right.” Anderson points to a section about a hundred yards ahead of us, a slight rise just before the road dips into a shallow gulch. Even by the standards of the drifts we’ve seen, this drift is a monster. A small hillock of crumpled ice and windswept snow.

“You got to hit them from the top,” Anderson says. “If you hit them from the bottom, you won’t go anywhere.”

He drops the grader into gear and flashes a smile.

“You do this for fun, don’t you?” I ask.

“This is fun,” he laughs, and lowering the hydraulic blade guns it forward.

***

Anderson knows a thing or two about snow removal. He knows a lot about snow, too, how it drifts, what makes it drift worse, how various densities of snow impact the blade, how to hit the deepest drifts. He’s even developed a theory on how much of the drifting that happens during a blizzard could be alleviated, though he admits the idea has pretty much fallen on deaf ears.

He knows, too, which roads are likeliest to get drifted in, and who lives on those roads and where, and whether they’re people who have to get out first no matter what—important people like the local physician, the veterinarian. In fact, it’s safe to say he knows the roads of Washington Township, all 50 miles of it, better than anyone alive. After all, he’s been plowing and grading them for the past 29 years.

Before that, he worked 26 years in the same capacity for the county. He’s been operating a grader for longer than most operators have been alive. He might even be, as some have suggested, the oldest grader operator in the state. Though he doesn’t use the word “operator” or “grader,” preferring the term “patrol.”

“I patrol the roads,” he says, patting the grader’s console.

And at 89 years of age, Anderson sees no reason to stop.

“I want to work, I don’t want to sit around,” he says. “I feel good about patrolling.”

Anderson’s introduction to large earthmoving equipment began at his family’s farm outside of Haddam. They had a D-4 Caterpillar with a little two-wheel pull-behind grader that was used to drag the roads. Though it wasn’t meant for snow removal, he discovered that working the Cat became second nature. “I had an eye for grading roads,” he says. “I guess it just came easy for me. I have the feel for it.”

His experience deepened in the years after World War II, when he served at Camp Chitose Air Base in Japan. The winters were long and fierce and bitterly cold, and the airmen used graders to keep the landing strips clear. It was a full-time occupation with constant snowfall and temperatures as low as 30 below.

When he arrived stateside, he brought his expertise to work with the county. Grading roads was fun, he was good at it, but snow removal was more fun. And not just anyone was adept at it. “I remember when I was working for the county, a guy couldn’t get in to work,” Anderson says. “He was snowed in. The boss told me to get him out, and I did.”

He credits common sense more than technical ability, though he admits that graders have evolved in power and functionality. Modern graders are bigger, heavier, stronger and much more expensive, but even so, drifts such as the ones he tackled this year pose distinct challenges. Making a single path down a drifted road is one thing, he says, but widening it is another. “Widening is the hardest thing I do,” he says. “If the snow is too deep you sometimes have to back up a half dozen times. To hit it from the other side you have to find an intersection to turn around in. It can be a lot of work. As I get younger, it’s a bit harder for me.” It takes about three summer days to grade all 50 miles of township roads. Winter roads are different. And this winter is unreal.

“The winter of ’83 was awful bad,” Anderson says. “It was probably the worst winter. 1960 wasn’t very good, either. But I’ve never seen the north-south roads drifted like this year.”

The last two blizzards have struck from the north and west, mostly from the west, with high winds, subzero temperatures and snow the consistency of flour. A normal winter storm will drift east-west roads. A normal winter storm will also melt reasonably fast. The 2009-2010 winter is already one for the records, and the snow that’s fallen doesn’t seem in a big hurry to leave. Which makes Anderson’s job that much more difficult, and time-consuming. Patrols have been running eight to nine hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes more. And now that Washington Township has gone dutch with Farmington Township on grading operations, it means late evenings and sometimes late nights behind the wheel of the grader. On nights when he works after dark, Anderson has a friend follow him in a truck. Though he also carries a cell phone, the companionship is comforting, especially under extreme conditions that have been the norm almost since Halloween.

One night during the last storm Anderson was out until midnight. Though the wind made for blinding conditions, he navigated more by the seat of his pants than by sight. “Usually we try to wait until the wind goes down,” he says. “This year, we went out whenever we could go.” It was on one such run that the grader got stuck in a drift. A call brought help. Anderson finds that rural residents are eager to see him on the way, and always ready to give a helping hand. “They take good care of me,” he says. “I’ve got more friends than I’ve got money.”

He’s also gotten more snow than he knows how to deal with. “Normally, the V-plow goes on only when it’s bad,” he says. “This year, it hasn’t been taken off. We haven’t done much widening since the last storm because there’s no place to put it.”

Going into the country with Anderson is an odd juxtaposition of roads that are almost dry and roads that are almost impassable. Mostly, it depends on their direction. Drifting has all but shut down many of the north-south roads, though now, a week after the last storm, almost all the roads are open at least the width of a truck. Every afternoon, Anderson ventures out to reclaim a few more feet of shoulder. As we nose onto National Road off 14th Road, the drifts reach higher and higher until they top the cab. Anderson says that when he first reached this stretch after the storm it was an unbroken expanse of snow. He couldn’t tell where the road ended and the fields started, so he dropped the blade and gave it some gas. The rest he gauged through his seat, firmly planted in the chair. If and when the grader begins leaving the road, he says, it can be felt, more as a slight shift in angle, a subtle tilting off the norm. It’s an experience he prefers to avoid. “I don’t know how those guys in Colorado do it,” he says. “Can you imagine driving blind with a thousand foot drop on one side?”

Driving blind is not without risks of another kind: running things over. With a grader weighing almost 50,000 pounds and a 10-foot blade, inanimate objects have a tendency to come out on the losing end. “Mailboxes,” he says. He smiles ear to ear as he says it, as if enjoying some secret pleasure. “I’ve done a few. It’s against the law to damage a mailbox, you know.”

And then there are fences. Often, fences collapse under the force of the snow being shoved against them. This year is no exception. “A lot of these fences are about done for,” he says.

When the plow hits a particularly deep drift, it lurches and bucks. Snow sailing off the blade sounds like rushing water, a soft sibilant hiss. When we pass a cornfield that hasn’t been harvested, he points to the depth of snow inside the ranks of corn. In contrast is a stark absence of snow on the road.

“I’ve told farmers that whenever they take the crops out along east-west roads to plant a dozen rows of corn along the road,” he says. “The corn acts like a snowfence like you see in Colorado. It would solve a lot of the drifting, and save the township a lot of money. But I don’t imagine they’ll listen.”

Another thing he dislikes is plum thickets. Drifts tend to pile up deeply on the lee side of thickets, and are in part responsible for the deep drifting on National Road. He’d just as soon take the grader to the thickets and flatten them, he says. “I usually ask the landowner before taking down a plum thicket, though,” Anderson says. “Or a fence.”

The cost of snow removal this season is cutting deep into city, county and township budgets. It’s one of the less glamorous expenses and one of the most critical. And afterward, all but invisible. “Once the snow melts,” he says, “you don’t have a blaming thing to show for it.”

Anderson, who turns 90 in August, says he has no plans to stop patrolling. Last year he sold his boat and camper and gave up on camping at Milford Lake, one of his few diversions. He said it wore him out more than plowing. “Heck, this ain’t work,” he says. “This is fun.” After blasting through the monster drift, he stops to let me off. My car is a quarter mile behind. Anderson waves and grins and takes off, and for a while I hear the engine deepen as the grader churns against drifts deeper than most people have ever seen, and then it reappears against the far ridge, a solitary yellow shape laboring against a merciless white landscape. The sun is low in the west, and bright. When it touches the rim of the horizon, Anderson will turn for home, and the next day start all over again.