600 Hours of Edward

ashen.
    “I’m sorry,” I say.
    – • –
    My legs kick into the air, my involuntary response to the expectation of certain death. When I don’t hit ground, my eyes open, and I squint as I adjust to the absence of light.
    From the nightstand, the green numbers of my digital clock cut through the dark: It’s 5:12 a.m. I take a deep breath as I wait for my heartbeat to slow, and then I turn away from the clock and clutch my spare pillow. I slip away again, this time into dreamless sleep.
    – • –
    It is 11:51 a.m. when I awake again. My data isn’t ruined—indeed, it has a first-time-ever entry—but my erratic sleep has cut into my day.
    In the bathroom, I pee long—and I’m not talking about distance, but rather, time. This is something I do not keep data on. First, it’s gross. Second, my sleep is ordinarily so reliable—in 297 days this year (because it’s a leap year), my wake-up time has been in a four-minute range for 294 of them—that it has other physiological benefits as well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my bathroom breaks are as predictable as my wake-up times.
    In the living room, I peek through the front-window curtain and see what yesterday’s
Billings Herald-Gleaner
foretold: snow. It’s not much—a medium dusting that will be gone as soon as the temperature gets into the high thirties, I would guess, though I don’t like to guess and will instead just wait and see what the facts bear out—but it’s snow, nonetheless. I can add a round of shoveling to my day.
    – • –
    Outfitted in snow boots, gloves, a hat, and a warm coat, I trudge out the back door, through the backyard gate, and to the garage, where I retrieve my snow shovel.
    When I was in Los Angeles two years ago, I told the desk clerk at the Renaissance Hotel at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue that I was from Billings, Montana, and he performed a little mock shiver. They say that everyone is an actor in Hollywood.
    “I couldn’t live there,” he said. “How do you handle the snow?”
    I thought that was a misinformed statement. Billings’s annual snowfall is 57.2 inches, which I will concede is a lot more than Hollywood gets, but it’s also less than Great Falls (63.5 inches) or someplace like Syracuse, New York (115.6 inches). I thought I might tell him this, but he was already handing me the room key and inviting me to “please let us know if you need anything at all.”
    I might further have told him that I enjoy shoveling snow, thank you very much, and that’s why I’m outside, bundled up and grinning.
    I find great appeal in a freshly shoveled sidewalk and driveway. I love how the blade of the shovel forms beautiful, clean lines where the snow once was. I carefully line up the edge of the blade with the edge of the sidewalk, and then I push through to the end of the property boundary with one stroke, then line the blade up against the edge of the swath I’ve just created and repeat the process.
    The driveway, being far wider than the sidewalk, requires several such swaths, and I push the snow out into the street, where the comings and goings on Clark Avenue will compress it and melt it away.
    It takes me less than a half hour to clear away the accumulations that have been building all day. I’ll probably have to come out again later, but I won’t mind.
    – • –
    At lunch, I dine on a Banquet beef enchilada meal. I have missed breakfast in all of my sleeping, and my medication has been pushed off until now. I’m a little off when I finally take it—not light-headed but definitely aware that something is not quite right in my system. As I sit and shovel forkfuls of Spanish rice into my mouth, I can feel the medication take root, and my unease drifts away.
    My father has made the front page of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
again, under the headline “Stanton denounces Big Sky EDA board.”
    By MATT HAGENGRUBER of the
Herald-Gleaner
staff
    Yellowstone County commissioner Ted Stanton, at odds with fellow commissioners and other members of the Big Sky Economic Development Agency advisory board since his pick for director fell through, criticized the panel Wednesday and signaled that the county faces a battle “for the soul” of its economic future.
    “I think the voters and the businesspeople of this region are going to have to take a hard look at this group,” Stanton said in an interview at his office. “I think when people really get into the meat of it, they’re going to