The Storm

It was the early eighties: A time before cell phones and GPS, not that they would have made any difference. Bryce Phillips had finally landed a job with a construction company building a nuclear power station in rural Illinois after being laid off from a position as an apprentice machinist at Precision Compressor in Coopersville a few months before. The road to the construction site was by back roads. Driving on them was usually routine and sometimes boring. It was normally a 45-minute drive, when the weather was cooperating. But in January when the stinging arctic blasts roar out of Canada and across the upper plains before scouring the Midwest, the drive on unplowed roads can be, shall we say, challenging.