Robert Bolduc wants his job back. I mean, he really, really wants his job back.

Fired from Lewiston Public Works in December, Bolduc said he’d gladly write his former employer a check for more than a thousand dollars. He’d happily accept a 10-year probation period. No problem. Whatever. He just wants to get behind the wheel of one of those big plows again and get to work.

It was one of the big plows that got him in trouble in the first place.

On Dec. 6, the season’s first major snowstorm was battering the area. More than a foot of snow had fallen by dark. Bolduc was part of a crew assigned to plow the city streets. Hulking, orange trucks roared through the city like tanks, and Bolduc was steering one of them. For 14 hours he plowed dead-end streets in the area of Pond and Randall roads. One of the good guys. A savior in a world of white.

Then the plow driver did something that woul d shape the course of his career. He made a choice regarded in the world of Public Works as unforgivable.

“I drove the plow truck home,” he said.

I got this from Mr. Bolduc during a telephone conversation. But even without seeing him, I sensed that he was hanging his head in shame. A moment later, he admitted as much.

“I made a really stupid decision,” he said. “I ran out of cigarettes and money, and decided to drive home. I don’t know why I thought that would be OK.”

Getting stuck

Bolduc lives in Wales. That’s an eight-mile trip in a massive city truck not renowned for its fuel economy. Still, Bolduc might have made it. He might have slipped home unnoticed and returned to his plow beat before anyone discovered his absence.

But, Bolduc said, “I got stuck.”

In fact, he got the plow stuck in deep snow at the end of his own driveway. The shame. The horror. The massive cost of having one of those gargantuan rigs towed out of the snow.

“I’m humiliated,” Bolduc said. “I don’t know why I did it.”

It cost more than $500 to have another giant truck come to haul the Public Works truck out of the snow. You can only guess how much fuel was consumed by it all.

So, one day not long after the snowstorm, Bolduc had to go see his bosses. He must have felt like a kid being called into the principal’s office, flat-out busted for something he had done.

They slapped him with a weeklong suspension right up front. Bolduc was sent home to think about what he’d done. But as luck would have it, the second big storm of the year rolled through the very day Bolduc was back at work.

“I worked for an hour plowing in that storm,” he said. “Then the director came out. He said he was told to send me home.”

This time, Bolduc was sent home for good. No more barreling down dead-end streets with the giant plow shoving away the wrath of winter. No more grateful neighbors and healthy paychecks.

“They told me what I did was as bad as stealing taxpayers’ money,” Bolduc said. “It was real easy for them to forget about the good things I did.”

Bolduc recalled his dozen years as a Public Works’ employee. He was once a union vice president. He built the wagon that sits at the top of Bartlett Hill. He’s responsible for a lot of the landscaping in several areas of Lewiston.

Misuse of radio

The landscaping got him in trouble in the past, too.

About a year ago, Bolduc got into a heated argument with an arborist while out on a job. Words were exchanged. There was a bit of shoving. I imagine a few flowers went flying.

Bolduc was reprimanded for misuse of a city radio when he called his supervisor to report the dust-up with the arbor guy. The matter went into his employee file. When the issue of the purloined plow came up in December, Bolduc was finished.

“I’m trying everything I can to get them to change their mind,” Bolduc said. “I love my job.”

Only it isn’t his job anymore. Bolduc is out of work. His wife is out of work, too, after undergoing surgery on her neck. A bleak winter stretches before them. Every time the snow falls deep on the roads, Bolduc will be reminded of what he had and what he lost.

“I made good money,” he said. “I had benefits. Things were good.”

There’s probably a moral in there somewhere. I rarely look for those things. For me, it’s just a sad, cautionary tale about the fleeting nature of the security we all seek. It’s just the grim story about a plow guy who reached the end of the road.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.