Somebody Has Been Shoveling Our Driveways for Six Years

Brandon Cowen is the one who has been shoveling our driveways. All eleven of them, every snow, before it is light out, since the winter of 2017, and not one of us on Ferris Street knew it was him until Doreen at number 4 caught him at twenty to five in the morning three weeks ago.

I have been trying to write this post since the day she called me, and I keep starting it in the wrong place, so I am just going to start at the beginning and you can all skip ahead if you already know the middle part.

Six winters of theories

The first year it happened we assumed it was the city. That lasted about a week, because the city does not plow residential driveways and has told us so in writing, twice, in a tone.

Then we decided it was a church group. There was a whole stretch where several of us believed this so completely that Marnie Dague-Foss, who lived at number 8 before she moved to Arizona, sent an anonymous donation to three different churches in February 2018 just to cover her bases. If you are one of those churches, I am sorry, and also you are welcome.

The teenager theory came next, and it had legs. Somebody’s nephew was supposedly doing court-ordered community service, and a shoveled driveway is exactly the kind of thing that sounds like community service. Gil at number 2 swore he saw a kid in a hood at the end of the street in January 2020. Gil also swears he has seen a mountain lion on the seawall.

What made it hard to solve is that it never happened at a consistent time and it never happened halfway. If it snowed four inches overnight, all eleven driveways were clear by six. If it snowed at two in the afternoon, it was done by dinner, and none of us were watching at dinner because we were eating dinner.

And the person did the aprons. That is the part I want people who do not live in a snow town to understand. Anyone can do the easy middle of a driveway. The apron is the wall of packed grey cement the plow leaves across the bottom of it, and it is the reason people my age end up in the emergency room in February. Whoever this was did all eleven aprons, every time, for six years.

What Doreen saw at 4:40 in the morning

On the ninth of January, Doreen Pyle at number 4 had a 6:05 flight out of Ashport and a cab coming at five. It had snowed six inches between midnight and three.

She got up at 4:40, stood in her front window with her coffee, and watched a man in a grey knit hat finish the last pass of her apron, straighten up, look at the driveway for a second the way you look at something you are checking rather than admiring, and then walk up the street and start on the Kesslers’ at number 6.

It was Brandon Cowen. Number 7. The house across from the Dembos, the one with the crooked hedge and the dog in the front window who does not bark, which frankly should have been our first clue about the whole family.

Doreen went out in her robe. She says he looked genuinely mortified. He said, and she is very firm about the wording, “please don’t make a thing out of this.”

Reader, she made a thing out of it. She called me from the airport gate at 5:50 in the morning. I have known Doreen Pyle for twenty-two years and she has never once called me before seven.

Brandon Cowen would like all of this to stop

I want to be fair to him here, because he has been very clear and we have all been very bad at listening.

Brandon has asked, more than once now, that we not write about it, not thank him publicly, and above all not bring him food. He said the shoveling takes him about ninety minutes and he is awake anyway. He said it is not a big deal in a tone that suggested he genuinely believes that.

Here is the Porch’s editorial position, arrived at by the three of us over the phone and one email that Hollis is still annoyed about: we are writing about it, and people are going to keep bringing him casseroles.

A neighborhood does not get to have a person like this and say nothing. That is not how a street works. If he wanted anonymity he should not have moved onto a road with eleven households and one Doreen.

The two houses at the end, first, always

Here is the detail that got me, and it is the reason this post took three weeks instead of one afternoon.

He does number 11 and number 9 first. He has always done number 11 and number 9 first.

Ruth-Ann Dembo has been at number 11 since 1988 and lost Walt in the fall of 2016. Eileen Barsotti-Krum has been at number 9 since 1994 and lost Denny two winters before that. They are the two houses at the end of the street, the farthest from Brandon’s, up the little rise where the wind piles it worst.

He starts there. Every time. Then he comes back down the odd side, crosses over, and works the even numbers up, and he does his own driveway dead last, which is why anyone looking out a window at seven in the morning would have seen a man shoveling his own driveway like a completely normal person.

Doreen worked the order out by walking the street after the storm on the nineteenth and looking at which piles had frozen hardest. She used to be a nurse. They notice things.

A word about the casseroles

In the two weeks after Doreen got back from her trip, we counted, by my best accounting, nine casseroles, a ham, two pies, a very large bag of coffee beans from the place on Wick Street, and a card signed by the entire Thursday quilting group, most of whom do not live on Ferris Street and simply heard about it.

Brandon returned the ham. He said he does not eat it, which nobody knew, which tells you how much we have all been paying attention. He kept the coffee. He kept exactly one pie, from Ruth-Ann, and I would love to know how she managed that.

Anthony has a sign-up sheet going, which he will explain in the comments at length whether or not you want him to. The short version is one household per week and nothing that needs a dish returned, because the man will wash your dish and walk it back to your porch at six in the morning and then we are right back where we started.

Anyway. Six winters. Eleven driveways. He is thirty-three years old and he was doing our aprons in the dark before most of us knew his last name, and now that we do, the Port Alden community is going to have to find some way to live with a person who will not let us say thank you.

We are going to keep trying. Sorry, Brandon.