Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Responding to a comment fiannaharpar made to my post about snow a couple of days ago, I managed to remind myself of a couple of snow driving stories.

Yeah, I'm going to brag. Deal.

I remember many years ago when the DC area got dumped on really hard with many inches of light, fluffy powder, I was cruising along route 193 through Greenbelt towards Bowie. There was nobody else on the unplowed road, and I was doing a respectable speed down the middle, throwing a snow-wake behind me, driving a 1978 Pontiac Catalina. In 1978, that was considered a "mid-size" car. Ten years later my friends all called it HUGE (mostly because none of them saw my father's 1972 Mercury Marquis Brougham to compare it to). Big ol' rear-wheel drive car with, I think, all-weather radials on it.

Then I came around a bend and saw A Hill. With a 45 MPH running start, I would've sailed right up it and probably not even fishtailed. But I couldn't do that because the hill was covered with cars. It was a slalom course, and I didn't have the traction to steer through it at any speed that would get me up and over it. Basically, I had to come to a full stop, which I did. Now folks did have a neigbourly solution: groups of people would push cars to the top of the hill, at which point the driver of the just-pushed car would walk down the hill to help a few other people get up. It was slow, but it worked.

I was feeling impatient that day, and didn't want to get out of my nice, toasty car. So I just cut the wheel over, spun the car a hundred and eighty degrees, noticed the concerned looks of the folks standing around, popped it into reverse, and backed up the hill. I went up cleanly, with my temporarily-front-wheel-drive, watching the looks on people's faces go from, "What is that idiot doing?" to "Hey, he just went right up and over the hill without anybody pushing him!". When I crested the hill I braked, spun the car around, and resumed my comfortable forward travel.

Most of the people stuck on that hill were probably there through no fault of their own -- once one person either failed to understand the use of momentum in that situation or chickened out on the run-up, the next several cars had to slow down below, uh, "escape velocity", to avoid collision. I just hope my trick worked for some of the people who watched me do it.

Another year, in the same car, we got hit with a foot of snow in November (it might have been only eleven inches, but you get the idea). For Maryland, that is very unusual. I was working in New Carrolton and had to get home to Greenbelt. Offices all over the place closed early, and it was instant rush-hour. Just getting out of the parking lot took forever, and then there was the line for the ramp to get on US-50 to get to I-95 (the Beltway at that point). I watched little front-wheel-drive econoboxes spinning their front wheels whenever the line tried to move forward, and I even wound up pushing one or two with my front bumper after obtaining consent when it was clear that they were simply not going anywhere under their own power no matter how skillful the driver. I decided to bail on that route and try back roads -- namely route 704 (I don't remember whether the name had changed from Palmer Highway to MLK yet at that point).

When I crossed the Beltway I saw that it was closed -- there was a sand truck stuck in the middle of it, and no other vehicles in sight. 704 was moving at a snail's pace, but it was at least moving. By this time most of that foot of snow was already on the ground, and apparently most of it had come down after a snowplow had been by. The right hand lane had a long line of cars following each other's tire tracks; the left hand lane had nine or ten inches of snow on it and no tracks. I got bored.

I pulled into the left lane and proceeded to make tracks. I had an amusing bow wave of snow. I couldn't go very fast -- maybe fifteen or twenty miles per hour, if that -- but still more than twice the speed of the line on the right. A few people jumped in behind me once I'd made a path for them. The only way I knew a plow had been anywhere in the area was the piles of snow blocking my lane at intersections, where I had to wait for someone to let me into the right lane to get around the obstacles. I'd like to think that my actions shortened the commute for a few other people that day.

(I didn't spin my wheels, and I didn't slide or fishtail. What I did looked impressive but was not difficult. All it took was keeping my speed down to something safe and paying a whole lot of attention in case anything started to go wrong. No special driving skill required; only imagination.)

When I got home, a plow had gone down the center of my apartment complex's parking lot leaving a berm of snow blocking the ends of all the parking spaces. One of my housemates was there, with her car idling in the plowed lane. She explained that some neighbours had said she could borrow their shovels after they finished clearing a space for their car, and asked if I'd be willing to help her clear a space for hers if she'd help me clear a space for mine. I'd been driving for an hour or three, and was tired. And frustrated. And I had a potentially better idea.

I rammed my car over the snow berm and into a parking space, landing on a foot of snow. I then struggled to back it out of the space, having to rock it to do so, being careful not to scrape the cars on either side as I wiggled my car out. Then I did it again. After four or five times, I extracted my car from the spot, and asked my housemate, "Can you get your car into that? More importantly, will you be able to get your car out of it again?" She said she thought she could. I picked another space, rammed the wall the plow had made, landed with a "*crumff*" on the snow in the parking space, declared that I would worry about getting the car out again the next day, and headed inside for hot cocoa.

Driving in snow can be hazardous, yes. Failing to adjust for conditions is bound to be expensive and can be deadly. That's one mistake the snow-idiots make (or adjusting but not adjusting enough, such as a habitual tailgater who finally backs off to what would've been a safe following distance on clean pavement but still isn't enough in the snow). The opposite mistake is nearly as bad (it can also be expensive, but it's more likely to be grossly inconvenient than fatal): adjusting inappropriately, being too timid, becoming an obstacle or even (inadvertently) creating traps for other drivers.

I don't mind others' being careful -- I encourage it -- even if they wind up being much more cautious than I am. They can compensate for real or imagined limitations of their vehicles, tires, or reflexes without my calling them idiots -- I may call them "in my way", but not idiots. But when somebody moving smoothly along slowly but fast enough to make it up a slippery hill, decides to come to a complete stop at the base of the hill and look at it for a while, thus removing any chance of making it to the top, well that I have a problem with. Likewise the folks who make it impossible for me to merge safely, the ones who park with most of the car sticking out into already too-narrow traffic lanes, those are the idiots as much as the ones flying to and fro without any real control of their vehicles because they don't understand that snow is slippery.

One of the messages I got from my father loud and clear even before I learned to drive myself was that (when driving), snow is to be neither ignored nor feared, but respected and adjusted for.