Rick Kaylor went to bed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, expecting to get up early and report to work about 5 a.m. Wednesday.

“Then he called us at 12 (midnight) and told us to come in,” Kaylor said of his boss. “I thought he was joking.”

I met up with Kaylor, who drives one of those huge V plows for the county highway department, just off U.S. 27 on Wednesday morning. He’d already been on the job for 10 hours.

“I’ve plowed 179 miles already,” he said – 179 miles of county roads covered in drifts up to 4 feet high and with sometimes no real indication of where the road stops and the ditch begins.

“I’m going to go until 3 or 5,” whenever his boss decided it was time for the people who drive county plows to knock off.

It didn’t matter that much to him whether he got off at 3, 4 or 5. His day would be 16 hours long, give or take an hour, and every road in the county would be open by the time he and other drivers went home.

It’s like that in the county, said Kaylor, who has been with the county highway department since 1979 and has been driving a plow for 15 years.

The state highway department has two shifts of drivers. The city has two or three shifts. The county has one shift, so drivers go all day and all night when there’s a storm like the one that hit this week.

“Four or five years ago, they laid off a whole lot of people when the city annexed Aboite,” Kaylor said. “So we got a whole lot less people and the same amount of road.”

And it’s not as easy as it looks. The first step into one of the big plows is about 3 feet off the ground. Inside the cab, it’s insufferably hot. Kaylor wears just a T-shirt. They have to keep it that way so the spray of snow, which sometimes puts up a blinding wall of white, doesn’t freeze on the windshield.

Kaylor constantly flipped the steering wheel back and forth, trying to maneuver the giant truck on the solid ice that was under the snow and keep it going straight as it slammed into drifts.

“You’re sore by the end of the day. It gets you back here,” Kaylor said, pointing to the space between his shoulders on his back.

Add to all of that the fact that constantly staring at nothing but white, you go almost snowblind.

Nevertheless, “Nighttime is the worst thing to plow,” Kaylor said. “You can’t hardly see. You have oncoming traffic, and they won’t move over and stay on their side. They think we’re going to move over, and we’re not.”

If a plow were to move over, the driver could be in for a big surprise.

“You gotta know the roads and not run off the edge,” Kaylor said.

In the city, plows have curbs. In the country, the only sign of the road’s edge is sometimes little bits of brown grass sticking up, and sometimes not even that. Go off the edge and the plow is in a ditch, and it might sit there for hours before help can come.

“We got a new person who’s been in the ditch twice,” Kaylor said, and Tuesday, one plow ended up on its side and its driver in the hospital.

“Don’t get off the edge, and don’t speed,” Kaylor repeated. But don’t ever stop either, he added later – “Stop, and you know what happens.” You get stuck. Yes, plows can get stuck.

Storm hype helped

And so in the stifling heat of a noisy cab constantly bouncing up and down and being knocked side to side on the icy road, Kaylor plowed along in one scary ride.

But he was relieved, in a way. He was just thankful we didn’t get the 18 inches of snow that had been predicted, and he was thankful for the hype the storm got. People paid attention to the Level 1 emergency and stayed off the road. It made his job a lot easier.

Eventually, Kaylor, who was plowing with a single-axle plow following up behind him, pulled over for a break. They normally don’t take breaks, he said, but after a few hours, you have to stop and stretch your legs, and besides, it was time for lunch.

Kaylor pulled a plastic tub out from under a pile of stuff in the cab. It was filled with carrots. That was lunch.

“Carrots?” I asked.

“I like carrots,” he said.

“I need something with gravy,” I said.

After a few minutes, the carrot-powered trucker resumed plowing.

Kaylor passed Marion Center Road, and it hadn’t been touched by a plow, but he couldn’t help.

“I can’t cross the bridge,” he said. “It’s 15 tons, and I’ve got 15 tons of salt and sand alone.” Someone in a small plow would have to hit it later.

Eventually, Kaylor was told by radio to plow Yoder Road. But we’ve plowed that, I said. But when we returned to Yoder Road, it looked untouched. The wind was kicking up and new snow was falling, making it harder to see than ever.

Kaylor had seen worse. In 1982, they worked 72 hours straight, sleeping in their trucks.

By now, I was getting exhausted, my eyes tired from constantly eyeballing the edge of the road and marveling at how close a massive V plow can come to mailboxes without ever hitting one. I wanted to go home.

Eventually, Kaylor dropped me off at my car and headed out for an area to the east, where he’d plow for a couple more hours before heading back to the garage and going home to get ready for the next day, when work would start at 5 a.m.

I asked Kaylor whether he’d collapse in bed exhausted as soon as he got home. No, he said, he’d probably stay up until 10 or 11, unless there was a fire call. He’s a volunteer firefighter with the New Haven-Adams Township Volunteer Fire Department.