PART 2 — THE KNIT HAT
The young woman walked back inside, tapped her glass until the room went quiet, and looked right at Uncle Doug. Doctor, she said, you were on call at St. Marys that night, were you not. So you already know what happened when my husband and I finally made it through.
She was holding a baby, and in her other hand a tiny knit hat.
The January before last, she told the room, she had gone into labor in the worst blizzard anyone could remember. Highway 61 was buried. The ambulance could not reach them. They tried to drive it themselves and got as far as a wall of snow that no car could pass.
Then headlights came through the white. A county plow, clearing a single lane straight down 61, slow and steady. The driver saw their stranded car, understood at a glance, and led them the whole way to St. Marys at ten miles an hour, holding the road open in front of them the entire time.
The plow Doug mocked had carved the only open road through a blizzard so a baby could be born in a hospital instead of a snowdrift.
Uncle Doug, the heart surgeon, had been on call that night. He had received that very couple when they came through the doors. He just never knew who held the road open so they could get there.
It was Jen. My daughter. Fifteen winters on a Duluth plow, and that night she led a laboring mother through the storm to the hospital doors.
Ten minutes before, Doug had raised his glass and said, thirty-eight and still pushing snow around, I do one surgery and make your whole winter. Jen had just gotten her coat to leave early.
The young mother held up the knit hat, the one her baby wore home from the hospital. We wanted the plow driver to have this, she said. We have been looking for her for a year.
Doug, who an hour earlier had made the whole winter sound like a joke, could not find a thing to say. He is a heart surgeon, and he did his part that night. But he could not have saved anyone if my daughter had not opened the road first.
Jen hugged the baby, and then she hugged its mother, and then, quietly, she finished putting on her coat and drove back out into the snow, because somewhere a road still needed clearing.