A Winter Memory

The recent weather in Atlanta has stirred memories of extreme weather. Georgians, unused to snow and ice were unprepared for the recent winter storm. It happens here occasionally but usually with disastrous effect. Schools close, cars crash, people freeze to death and folks from the north ridicule us. To be fair, the people from Georgia rarely experience heavy winter conditions. Maybe once in four or five years, and at that, maybe three or four days at a time. That's just not often enough or for long enough for people to learn the hazards and how to avoid them.

I spent part of a winter in Minneapolis back in the early 70s. I bought a Chevy Vega station wagon. It had been my father's which he traded in on something else, I don't remember what but we made a deal with the dealer and I good a good deal on his trade-in (I hate repeating words in sentences but this strikes me as aMusing). As winter came on, I had to buy snow tires for the car, a necessity in Minnesota.

In the film Une Homme et une Femme, there are scenes of rallye driving in the snow where drivers set up the angle of the car to make a turn well in advance of the actual curve. On my daily drive to work, there was a long downhill stretch before the intersection to the street the office was on. There was a clear view of the opposite approach too. The roads were often snowy and on days when it was clear I managed to perfect that somewhat sliding diagonal approach to the left-hand turn. I don't think I'd have been able to stop if there was another car coming. Occasionally, I'd slide all the way across nearly to the right-hand curb.

Winter driving in Minneapolis poses some interesting problems. I once found a parking spot on a main road. Main roads get plowed while many other roads do not. When I got back to my car less than an hour later, I had to dig through snow to get my driver's side door open. I'd been "plowed in". It took a lot of jockeying back and forth to crash my way out of that parking spot. Traveling on less than arterial streets could also be difficult. Unplowed streets would build up quite a thick layer of ice. At traffic lights, after a stop it would be difficult to start again. I'd have to put the car in gear and release the clutch then open the door and push until we started rolling then hop back in. To get into a parallel parking space, I'd pull the front of the car in, then, leaving the car in gear, get out and shove the back end in toward the curb. Getting out of that parking space was also a matter of shoving a car that is, technically moving, back and forth until it could be pushed free. At least the exercise mitigated the cold a bit. Speaking of which, Walking out of the lobby of the apartment house in which I lived, the humidity in my nostrils would instantly freeze with the temperature drop of nearly a hundred degrees. Walking in was equally shocking with a near hundred degree temperature jump.

By the end of February, I'd had enough. I was introduced to a young woman (I don't recall her name so I'll call her Jane) who wanted to go to San Francisco and, in thinking about it for a day or two, decided that I wanted head west too. I'm a desert boy, just not cut out for cold weather on a long term basis. Camping in the desert in the winter, it gets below freezing at night but the days can be up in the eighties. I can cope with that. Temperatures at or below zero for months at a time? Not for me. So I put my stuff in the back of the Vega and collected Jane one afternoon and we headed south on I-35 for Des Moines before turning west on I-80. The next evening, we reached Cheyenne, Wyoming and I needed to sleep. We found a movie theater with a parking lot across the street so Jane went in and I took a nap in the back of the car. It was very cold so I had to keep the engine running to keep the car warm. When the movie let out, Jane came back and we were off again to meet a blizzard further west. The driving wasn't too bad but semis on the road were going pretty slowly, ten or fifteen miles per hour slower than I was comfortable with, we still had a long way to go. The trucks blew up huge clouds of snow around them so passing them was difficult. The only way to do that was to pull up along their left sides then, because there was no forward visibility whatever, I had to look out my right window at the side of the truck and judge by my distance from it whether I was going straight or not. At forty five or fifty miles per hour, it was a slow and scary process. I got a bit better and braver about it after the fourth or fifth truck but I never got comfortable with it.

The next morning we were coming into Nevada and looking down a hill on a long straight stretch of Interstate. The right lanes in both directions were scored with the dark impressions of tire treads while the left lanes were pristine white. Those roads weren't very heavily travelled that day. I suppose the blizzard from the day before had dampened a lot of travel plans. Wells, Elko, Winnemucca, Lovelock, Reno all gradually slid behind us until we reached the foot of the Donner pass. The California Highway Patrol was requiring all cars going over the pass to have chains and were making people who weren't carrying them rent them from vendors on the side of the road. We inched along as  they were checking car by car. We pulled up to the officer and, noticing my Minnesota license plate, he waved us through before I'd even had time to stop. It seemed odd to me then and still does. The whole interstate had been plowed and it had completely stopped snowing. We passed dozens of cars going painfully slowly both up and down the pass on the other side in an effort to save their tires from chafing from the chains.

As we neared Sacramento, we had to stop and step out of the car for a few moments to savor the wonderful warmth of California. I was sixty degrees out. To us, that was balmy weather after the zero and below temperatures of Minnesota.