I was visiting with a friend in Southern Illinois when someone told my friend and me that a snow storm was coming. I made an arrogant reply: “I don’t care: I’m from Pittsburgh, and driving in snow does not bother me.” The first part of that statement is true; the last part, a lie. I confessed to that lie to a man sitting with me in the waiting room of a Ford dealership in Effingham, Illinois, where my car had stopped running, 140 miles from my home. Not only do I hate snow, I really hate driving in it, and getting stranded does little for my disposition.
It is a true and verifiable fact that I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Penn., a place often visited by the gods of snow. As I told the man in the waiting room, I used to grumble at the idea of school closures for my children because I cannot remember ever missing school because of snow. It may be a manufactured memory, but I do believe that I walked in the tracks of larger kids who had tromped a path through the snow on the way to school. Of course, I lived very close to the school I attended, but not every child had that advantage, and still – we did not miss school for snow closures. After I graduated from high school and started art school, I shared an apartment with a co-worker at the psychiatric hospital where I worked nights. I took a trolley car to work and school — yes, there were still trolleys in 1965 — and buses to wherever else I needed to go. I had no access to a car, found no grinding need to have one, and so, never learned to drive. My bride-to-be taught me how to drive, and one year after we were married, we left Pennsylvania for California. So, I spent almost no time driving in snow, in Pittsburgh.
The snow storm mentioned by the man in that small Southern Illinois town had clamped down hard on the streets and highways, and as I crept along, I was thankful for the new brakes that had been put on my car a few days before I took that trip. The snow-covered medians of Interstate 70 East were scored by the tracks of errant automobiles and littered with cars that had slid off the blacktop; emergency vehicles were attending to some of the slide-offs, while in others, people sat waiting. A jack-knifed truck, still steaming, had police crime scene tape around the cab. When a stretch of highway was clear enough for me to achieve a modest speed — not the posted 70 mph — I was suddenly presented with the glow of rear taillights in front of me. I pressed down on my new brake pads, and for the first time in a long time, I felt the jump and release of my Anti-Lock Braking System as it worked to slow me on the slick road.
In John Steinbeck’s memoir, Travels with Charley in Search of America, he wrote of all the energy we expend in driving, the foot-pounds of pressure on the accelerator, “the muscles of shoulder and neck, constantly if unconsciously flexed for emergency … the thousand decisions so deep … (that the) output of energy, nervous and muscular, is enormous.” By the time my car crapped out in Effingham, I was a wreck.
So here, I correct the record, as I did with that friendly stranger in the waiting room: I hate snow, and driving in it terrifies me.