When it comes to plowing the (dirt) road to my cabin, there is a Catch-22 involved. The town says no, because it's their contention that no one inhabits the camp in the winter. I say that I don't go there because I can't reach it. It is not plowed.

Here is what the road looked like last week. It is a public road, and the town plows most of it because there are about seven houses there. OK. They are year-round homes. I fall into the pejorative classification of "seasonal."

Kevin the Well Digger, who used to be Kevin the Road Commissioner, says there would be problems plowing to my driveway. It can't be seen here but it is about 150 yards down on the right.

He says one problem is that the big trucks would have nowhere to turn around. The truck now turns in the wide driveway of my neighbor. But my drive is narrow, and it could be trouble. Also, I have a (thin) aluminum pipe over the culvert and I think it might cave in under a big weight.

Kevin also says that if the road gets "too good," it will invite landowners to consider building houses down past me. Actually, houses are going up each year on my once anonymous road. There have been five in the last four years, suggesting that my little piece of "wilderness" isn't very wild.

(An aside: My daydream is to build closer to the river. But I'd have to sell the cabin itself to do that, and that seems self-defeating. Also, it is about 1,600 feet from the road to the river, and the cost to get materials to the river's edge would be prohibitive.)

I guess it's not in the cards to have the road plowed so I can escape the "seasonal" designation for an "all-year" status.

I know one thing. If I were the road commissioner, I would not want to plow this dark, narrow corridor during the middle of a raging storm. Or even after it was over . . .

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