At least a hundred million Americans drive in the snow every year. With lots of experience, they get pretty good. I don’t get as much experience, because we don’t get much snow. But last week I had quite an experience driving in snow.
Our dog Stella attacked our dog Mollie early in the morning. It took a lot of pepper spray in Stella’s eyes to get her to release Molly, who I then took to the vet. Her injuries weren’t life-threatening but they still cost us about $500 to get her all patched up. I had to leave her there for the day. They called me at 11:00 AM to inform me that they’d stitched up her wounds and I could pick her up as soon as she came out from the sedative—probably around 3:00 PM. I asked if I couldn’t pick her up sooner, because a snowstorm was bearing down on us and I wanted to complete the trip before we got snowed in. The vet allowed as how we might be able to pick her up as early as 1:30, but she might still be too groggy to walk.
I normally meet Kathy for lunch every Tuesday, so I planned to pick up Molly immediately afterwards. I got to the vet’s at 1:15 and was out of there by 1:30. It had started snowing around 12:00 noon, but the snow was coming down slowly and it wasn’t sticking, so I wasn’t overly worried.
My route home took me up Cady Road, a steep and winding road about a mile long. As I approached the first incline, the snow was perhaps two inches deep. The road wasn’t icy, so again I wasn’t worried. Much to my surprise, my van started to slip as the road grew steeper. I was in trouble even before I got out of Jacksonville. The van was slithering around on the road and I was making less than 5 mph. But I found that, by frantically turning the steering wheel right and left in response to the squiggling of the van, I could somehow make forward progress. It was intense work, gauging every tiny detail of the road ahead, planning my angle of attack at each point, trying to plot a path that took best advantage of the small variations on surface quality.
Slowly, slowly, I edged out of Jacksonville. At one point I considered backing down, but I decided that I would have even less control going down than up, and the road had steep sides in a number of places where going off the road could well be catastrophic. I was constantly varying the throttle. Slowing down would give me a bit of traction; as soon as I had some traction, it was worth getting a little more speed up. Staying slow didn’t improve my traction; the slipping seemed to come almost randomly. I was learning to read the road quickly.
Then along came a county pickup truck with a snow plow. This was bad, because for maximum safety I had been in the middle of the road. Now I had to move over the edge of the road, staying in my lane with maybe a foot of clearance on either side. That’s plenty of clearance in normal conditions, but with these slippery conditions, I was not optimistic. Somehow I managed to get out of his way without going over the side. As soon as I got past him, I moved over into his lane. It was the wrong side of the road, but I didn’t expect to encounter anybody coming down. And the plowed road gave MUCH better traction. “This is going to be a lot easier” I told myself.
It WAS a lot easier for about a quarter of a mile, but the snow was now coming down fast and thick, and it wasn’t long before I was slithering again. I learned to constantly change direction; counterintuitively, a highly variable angle of attack seemed to work. Back and forth I went, a little left, then a little right, slowly crawling up the road. I was down to a few inches per second. Sometimes the van would lose all traction and just sit there with the wheels spinning, but by varying the throttle and the steering wheel, somehow I managed to get past every slippery spot.
The 1984 Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo, and I will never forget one of the competitions. It was a downhill skiing race, with plenty of twists and turns. One of the racers was insane: he refused to slow down for anything. He went into every turn with his arms waving wildly, his legs akimbo, looking for all the world like he was about to lose all control and fly off into the forest. Yet somehow this maniac made it through every turn. My whole family was roaring with laughter watching this guy. It was almost like a cartoon version of a ski race. I can’t recall if he won the race but it was far and away the wildest, craziest skiing performance I had ever seen.
I was starting to feel like that downhill racer as I inched my way up Cady Road, slithering left and right, making little spurts of progress and then coming to an almost-stop. At several points the downhill side of the road was a steep decline going down more than a hundred feet; had I slipped over that edge, I could well have been killed. I didn’t have the time to regret my decision to come home; there was no going back, just up.
Two more cars came down the road, forcing me to crowd over to my own lane to squeeze past them. They were both four-wheel drive trucks; they must have wondered mightily at this fool trying to go uphill in a van. Then I saw the snowplow truck coming up behind me. Although I once again had to make way for him, I was overjoyed that he was plowing the road for me. Somehow he slipped past me and I got over into the newly-plowed lane as quickly as was possible. But then he pulled over after just another hundred yards. I was back on my own.
Somehow I made it up Cady Road. It was still more than two miles to my house, but Sterling Creek Road is mostly downhill from there. It does have a few serious uphill sections, but if I went off the road there I wouldn’t be injured and I could walk home. I crawled up the steep sections with confidence; I figured I could drive this damn van to Alaska if I wanted. I made it home after 50 minutes on a drive that normally takes 14 minutes.
I still can’t believe that I actually pulled that off. I have never come so close to failure so many times under such adverse circumstances. I doubt that many people could have pulled off the feat; there were too many close calls that should have done me in. Maybe it was experience playing videogames that quickened my reflexes. Game designers, there’s a possibility here…
