Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I heard spinning tires in front of my house. I heard them for a long time, so I finally went to a window to see what was going on. That was half an hour ago. (I started typing this at about a quarter to six, though I'm not sure what the timestamp is going to say. I went back to edit and reformat some parts, so it's taken me a while to finish.)

The governor has signed an order saying that only emergency travel is permitted on Maryland roads (I'm not sure whether that applies to city streets, or only state roads), with penalties up to $1000 or a year in prison.

There was a white van spinning its wheels. Judging from the sound and the amount of smoke/steam/spray, I'd guess the driver had the speedometer up around 35MPH, and he wasn't budging an inch. A guy with a shovel attacked the snow in front of the rear tires every time the driver stopped spinning them. Then three or four other men with shovels (mostly flat-edged spades, and one snow shovel, I think, plus one of those pointed shovel shovels that didn't look like it was the right tool for snow and ice) started helping out. A few people (including me, leaning out the window) tried to tell the driver to give it less gas, since all he was doing was polishing the ice. By the time the first shovel-guy convinced the driver to switch places with him, there was a row of cars to the other end of the block, all waiting for the obstacle to move. (The new driver had more clue, but it was a tricky spot and he still had trouble getting the van to inch forward. And the initial driver couldn't figure out that if he heard a spinning tire and the one he was looking at wasn't moving, he had to worry about the one on the other side.)

I was out in this stuff four or five hours ago, which is to say, several inches ago. It's messy. I had to move my car off of Lombard St. because I had no idea whether Baltimore was going to start enforcing the Snow Route parking restrictions. (Last I heard, they were still thinking about it.) I bought gas and came home and parked on a cross-street that didn't have Snow Route signs. (I just *pfoomfed* my car into heavy snow and made sure it was close enough to the curb to be legal.) This snow is slippery. It's not the worst I've driven in, or at least it wasn't five hours ago, but it's fluffy powdery stuff, and it's deep. Even after the Big Yellow Thingie went by, Lombard St. is still a mess. The only places I've seen pavement at all have been where a shovel or a smoking tire has exposed a few square inches at a time, and that's covered over again in no time at all.

By the time they got up to three men pushing on the back of the van, I could see that the next block back was a line of stationary headlights waiting to advance, and I thought I saw some cars on the block before that. So it was a two or three block stuff-up. By now the folks on my block were getting impatient. A red, front wheel drive sedan was merrily spinning its front wheels, and a pickup truck made as if to go around everyone but bogged down in the deeper snow to the side of the sort-of-plowed stripe.

Driving in the kinds of snow we usually get around here is mostly a matter of patience, calmness, a little common sense, and maybe the merest smidgen of comprehension of physics. (By which I mean mechanics, smart-alec -- not electricity & magnetism or quantum.) But for the significantly more messy stuff -- sheet ice, or snow that's both deep and fluffy with a layer of extra-slick on the bottom -- there's a *knack* to it. I had second thoughts about going all the way to a gas station earlier, and I have the knack. I may not be an expert at conditions we don't face every year here, but I have the knack. I can do it. If I know it's fluffy snow instead of wet snow, I'm not scared of getting into the deep stuff if I have enough momentum in the right direction. And I learned this in rear-wheel-drive cars. I figured then, around one in the afternoon, that if I had to drive through very much of what I'd just dug the front half of my car out of, I was likely to have annoying amounts of trouble; and if I mostly had to deal with the half-foot of churned up stuff I saw in the middle of the road the whole way, I'd only have to be careful and hope nobody else did something stupid that screwed me up. And if I was going to get stuck at all, it'd happen when I was going around the block to get my car off of Lombard St., too. All you Northerners and MidWesterners have to remember that folks here don't have chains, and most are using all-weather radials or worse -- there aren't even all that many sets of snow tires around that I've seen. This snowfall is already about as much as we've had the rest of the winter, and that was already something like twice our average and ten times last winter.

They finally got the van through the intersection, where it stopped again. And another vehicle next to it, so that even if somebody could get around one, they couldn't get around both. Then the men with the shovels went to work on the red sedan, who brute-forced his way out by spinning his right front tire about 45MPH to creep forward at 5MPH, throwing an impressive (and surprisingly narrow) jet of snow behind him ... until he crossed the intersection and was stopped behind the white van again.

Like I said, I've got the knack. I mean, I pulled my car out of a snowdrift after only digging the front wheels (and back window and roof) out, with a short, sharply angled channel leading away from the curb, because I was too lazy to dig the rest of the car out or make a longer track to follow and I knew that I could extract the car that way ... and it took me some jiggling and some back-and-forth and putting my rear wheels on the sidewalk briefly, but I did it without resorting to more digging once I got behind the wheel. I'm not great at getting cars unstuck, but I'm good enough that it's frustrating watching folks who can't do it in the center of the street try fruitlessly. Even so, I learned a new trick today. (When trying to get started again after stopping at a traffic light, I found it helpful to turn the steering wheel back and forth slowly until I got up to about 3 MPH -- this was in a front-wheel-drive car with an automatic transmission, and I haven't tried to figure out why it worked yet. I tried it on a hunch.) My biggest problems just after midday were pedestrians (no navigable sidewalks, and the only part of the street shallow enough to walk in was right where I needed to drive) and electrical issues (snow got onto some wires with sliced-up insulation and the car stalled ... three times) but I watched what problems other cars were having and decided that most of them weren't idiots (except for one who tailgated me at nearly 20MPH, and two who tried to pass me on the left while I was making a left turn), just not quite as good at snow as I am. It was difficult to get a car moving forward from a stop, and even worse if pointed ever so slightly uphill; having room to "rock" the car (gently!) came in handy. Judging sliding distances was an important part of stopping. Knowing exactly how much traction I had for making gentle turns was crucial. And staying as far away from parked cars as pedestrians in the road and oncoming traffic would allow was a Very Good Idea. There's a feel thing to this kind of driving, not just for the not-sliding-into-things part, but also for the not-getting-stuck part. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I bet everyone who's any good at it knows what I mean.

Three blocks of stopped cars. Half an hour. No ambulances or fire engines in that time, thank goodness, but I guess I understand why the governor really doesn't want anyone to drive now.

Even people like me shouldn't be out there now, at least not on West Lombard St., which doesn't get much attention from Public Works despite being a Snow Emergency Route. Not even on Fulton Ave., which has been plowed a few times today (the stretch of Fulton near my house is the northbound half of US Route 1) and still looks like crap and has cars and trucks spinning their wheels trying to get up it. I don't know what MLK Blvd or Route 40 look like, but I know what shape the roads leading to and from those are in. My going out this afternoon was a questionable decision despite my confidence in my skill.

The driver of that white van had no business being on the road. Probably most of the people behind him, too, but he really should have just backed his van to the curb and begged somebody with more traction and more skill to take him home. Not that I can reasonably expect anyone to make that decision -- I don't know that I could've given up and left my car if I were in as far over my head as he was, either. But he might wind up having no more choice in the matter a mile or two further along than the pickup truck I saw parked nose-to-wall in a snowdrift on Frederick Ave. earlier, not quite ninety degrees to the traffic lane.

I'm just glad I wasn't stuck in traffic behind him.