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• Adventures into winter weather

As you all will soon be aware, this column is probably too little, too late, at least as a warning. This is usually the case anyway, but it seems particularly true this time. Geez Louise, it's only the end of December and I simply assumed I'd have plenty of time to do a winter preparedness piece before the weather turned to 50 kinds of shit.

Apparently I should have written something at the end of November. The weather so far this year hasn't really been bad, it's been just plain scary. Global warming is not working out the way I was told it would, so the best we can do is suck it up and try to hang on until spring. Consider this a warning to be careful out there.

Winter weather has already bitten me in the ass and I wasn't even really asking for it. Okay, maybe a little, but still. Fine, it didn't really bite me, but it did growl enough to scare the bejesus out of me and make me run away in terror. It was just supposed to be a simple little trip to Charleston.

I was attempting to go south on I-57 with the wife when the freezing rain started. I don't know how in the piss it was coming down as rain since the temperature was about 15 degrees, but I have to assume Mother Nature was having some sort of tantrum. It was so freaking cold and the rain was freezing on the windows so fast that the wipers couldn't knock it off. I mean, I know ice is technically clear but it's still not something you want to try and see through when you're going 40 miles per hour.

Traffic slowed down a little and for a moment I considered the possibility that we were all just lemmings following the car ahead of us into disaster. In all honesty, there weren't many options at that moment. Even if our brakes would have worked, I was not confident that anyone else's would have. The best choices seemed to be to pray quietly to myself and pretend I wasn't pissing down my leg. Neither choice worked very well.

The situation quickly appeared almost hopeless. Sadly, the only hope I actually had was that our death would be as quick and painless as possible. There were semis in front of us, behind us, and beside of us, almost as if they were cornering their prey. They were huge sighted cheetahs and our car was a tiny blind zebra. The anticipation of our demise was almost more than I could handle.

Some people were attempting to pull off to the shoulder, but that didn't seem like an especially good idea either. It's just a matter of time until someone veers over and slams into the back of you. Hell, some of the idiots were pulling over, getting out, and scraping ice from their windshields. This is a bad idea if other drivers can see you. It's far worse when they can't. I kept going forward, looking through a hole in the ice on the windshield that was slightly larger than a postage stamp. My neck was locked in a twisted position that would later cause me great pain.

It was sometime around this point that I began screaming in a high pitched voice. Such bravery really impressed the wife. It seems like a blur, but my verbal barrage had something to do with my not being able to see and how we were all going to die. It's weird because I've always thought I was good in a crisis. Usually though, the crisis is a project that has to be done the next morning and is not life threatening in any way, instead of an icy death trap. We kept going forward, squinting through that tiny little hole in the windshield.

The exit to pull off was now only a couple miles away and I became a tad bit more optimistic. I still didn't think we would get there necessarily, but I thought that maybe if we were lucky our car would just be thrown out into a corn field where we would be left to die in the freezing temperatures. I mean, I've read enough Jack London to know how to survive in the cold, but I still wasn't prepared to cut my wife open so I could warm my hands in her insides. It suddenly occurred to me that we have to start bringing the dog on these little trips, just in case.

Finally I could actually see the exit and began to edge over. The icy twisting ramp looked about as safe as one of those traveling carnival roller coasters. We were now going about ten miles and hour and that seemed about 20 miles per hour too fast. We finally pulled off the road to temporary safety. I got out to scrap the windows, somehow forgetting that if the car is slipping around, a human will also probably slip around. After doing a brief, spastic ice tap dancing routine, I regained my balance and finished the job at hand.

Somehow, we were fine. Maybe not fine, but we were okay. It's amazing how just being able to see out of a windshield can really boost a person's spirits. We smiled at each other and turned back towards home, vowing never to step outside again until March.