Snowstorm or Blizzard

Snowstorm or Blizzard

Everyone in the blinding whiteness has to convince themselves they are safer than they actually are.

Our youngest son was a skier. When he was 11, he went with a teammate to Marquette, Michigan to complete mandatory training before three days of downhill ski racing. I was late in joining him because I was taking care of our oldest son who was ill with a bad virus. Eventually I set out for the upper peninsula (UP) at three in the afternoon just a day before his ski competition was to begin.

Just past Gitche Gume RV park in the upper peninsula, Route 28 runs very close to and right alongside the waters of Lake Superior. The lake is god there. In late January of 2011 at three in the morning, somewhere along this stretch of Route 28, there was a twelve-foot plowed and compacted wall of snow towering over the left side of the road and on the right side of the road was the fury of Lake Superior roaring herself absolutely hoarse. I couldn’t see the lake in the darkness and snow, but I knew it was just a hundred yards to my right because I could see it in my GPS.

Visibility had decreased to zero.

I had stopped 45 minutes earlier at a gas station for caffeine. There was a whole chart hanging next to the computer screen detailing the wind speeds and duration of conditions for determining snowstorm conditions versus blizzard conditions. Route 28 had been listed as ‘open and in intermittent snowstorm conditions’ on the upper peninsula weather screen in the gas station.

In the real world however, everything was ice and wind and loneliness along Route 28.  My Toyota Sienna minivan was trapped in a vortex of violence pounding my car so hard it was rocking back and forth.
After the storm consumed my minivan and there was no going forward anymore, my headlights created a desperate little cocoon where I existed in a hurricane of brightness with no way out. Snowplows threatened to crush me from behind or from ahead. I had no idea where I was on the road in relation to the lake on my right or in relation to the giant plowed snow bank on my left. I hadn’t passed another car for hours so I assumed I would for sure be dying by snowplow.

There was danger everywhere, but mostly inside of me. The whiteness had consumed me.

Everything seemed binary on Route 28.

Death by snowplow or death by frostbite and hypothermia.

Fight or surrender.

Survival or erasure.

​Maybe everything is a little of all of that.

I can’t say how much time passed as I came to an understanding with myself in my mini-van on Route 28 in the upper peninsula. I was there an indeterminate length of time, with no control and with no purpose. Fear distorts time.

In the end, though, I was furious. Fury is always the last emotion for me before true understanding sets in.

 I opened my car door, hung my body out of the minivan as far as I could, leaned my head down as far as possible between my door and the car, and by the light of my headlights, which was reflected everywhere, I found tire tracks to follow. I barely looked up at the road knowing the tire tracks were my lifeline. There was nothing to see anyway. Even if a snowplow were headed straight for me, I would never see it.

I inched my minivan forward this way, constantly searching for tire tracks, for evidence that someone had been here before me and had known the way.

Forty minutes later I was free of the worst of the storm.

I’ve told this story a lot over the years and the reactions are interesting. They range from irrational to  bluntly accusatory to supportive.

• Were you drinking? (No.)
• Why didn’t you ask the gas station guy if you should have waited? (I did chat with the gas station guy. SHE said these were typical conditions for the area.)
• Did you check your weather app? (Of course. It did not look remarkable. Just snowy.)
• Why would you drive all that way alone? (I do most things unsupervised.)
• Couldn’t you tell the weather was going to get worse? (No. My horoscope said nothing about this.)
• That’s why you don’t drive at night. (Don’t be ridiculous. Blinding squalls kick up during the day too.)

​Every so often someone hits on the meat of the real issue: “You could have died.”

After so many tellings of this tale, I’ve realized that the reactions of other people are not about them impugning my driving or my decision making skills. It’s about them being unable to accept that just driving could put them seconds away from death.

In every Covid conversation, in every Covid post, every single one, there are people who comment that the Covid disabled person or a person dead from Covid or a person hospitalized with Covid must have had a pre-existing condition.

“Well. They musta had some condition or disability. Right? Right?” 
"They didn't take care of their immune system."
"They shoulda been more careful."
 
What they really mean is, “I so very badly need to justify why I’ll be safe, even though others have not been safe.”
 
There’s no real distinction between a snowstorm and a blizzard when you’re driving in one. All of our charts, maps, graphs, and apps can’t change this. Control is a savory illusion. I was nearly taken from the world by nothing more than water. That’s the way it is.

Everyone in the blinding whiteness has to convince themselves they are safer than they actually are.