Snow Odyssey!
Actually a pretty accurate use of “odyssey” there, as it was a trip that took far longer than it should have, and involved dodging a lot of monsters.
So I set out from work a bit past noon. As I’m walking to the garage, my mother calls my cell phone to ask when I’m going home. I tell her I’m on my way and will call her when I get home. According to my phone, this was at 12:27. Note the time. This is important. Three minutes later I’m in my car.
The first sign of trouble should have been how much snow was piled up in the parking garage. I mean sure, it drifts, but it was more or less snowing inside the parking garage, which is a really BIG parking garage. That’s how heavy the snowfall and strong the wind was.
I get in the car, I head out. Doing the driving in slow-mo thing. I debate my route. There are basically three roads from my office in the general direction of my house: primary (one way, three lanes wide), secondary (two-way, one lane each side, but large and commercial with an elevated train overhead), and tertiary (two-way, one lane each side, small and residential, just a yellow line up the middle).
I usually take the tertiary road, because I hate other drivers, particularly in Philly, where they are complete fucking idiots. (Seriously. Of course most drivers here are fine, but Philly seems to specialize in a particular class of horrible driver, perhaps one out of every seven or eight, who stops at random, can’t stay in their lane (even if it’s the only one), and generally seems to not have good command of their vehicle. It’s as if they got their license yesterday, never had a driving class, and are talking on the phone. I mean, NY drivers are aggressive assholes, but Philly drivers are plain incompetent.)
But anyway. I initially think about staying on the primary road, on the theory that it will be clearer for having heavier traffic. This is the road the parking garage lets me out onto. Within a few blocks I see that despite heavier traffic, the road is entirely unplowed and the street is really bad to drive on. I figure with so many people, the odds of trouble go up, so I turn off and head for the tertiary road that I prefer.
The first 45 minutes are fine. This gets me to about where I get in 15-20 minutes on a normal day. I’m not cracking 15mph, and there are plenty of traffic lights, but okay, everyone is being reasonably intelligent and taking it slow. I’m repeating the mantra, “It’s better to get home slowly than not get home at all,” and remaining calm.
But the snow is only getting worse, and now we’re far enough along that some people are starting to lose patience and do stupid things. I can’t tell you how many assholes decided to hop into the oncoming lane of traffic in order to pass a handful of cars. It’s a wonder no one got shot. Seriously, I would have been a witness for the defense: “Sure, they shot him, but the guy totally deserved it.”
So eventually, nearly an hour into the trip, I reach a point where I have to go uphill. There is no avoiding this. I can go lots of different ways, but hills will be there. This is what happens as you drive away from large rivers.
I pick a particular route that has a long, shallow downhill first, followed by a fairly steep uphill. This route turns out be, yes, COMPLETELY UNPLOWED. Pretty much nowhere was plowed. (I don’t understand this, coming from a city where the plows and salt trucks hit the road before the first flake even lands. NYers may freak out at 8” of snow in a way that has New Englanders and Upper Midwesterners snickering, but by Crom, we do at least have aggressive snow-removal procedures. The Philly area seems to go on a “Well, some people might wreck or die; they shouldn’t have gone to work in the first place” principle.)
So back to this uphill. I’m leaving plenty of room in front of me, as is prudent, and we discover why. Several cars in front of me, the car is having a hard time getting up the hill, sliding to the side. Some asshole behind me goes shooting past (in the oncoming lane of traffic), tries to pass the stuck car, and just about does a 180 fishtailing all over the place. That asshole stops, gets a grip on himself, and then continues on, sliding all over.
The oncoming traffic, having witnessed this shithead, has stopped to let him go past. They resume forward when the way clears. But no sooner has that clot of traffic cleared than another asshole comes up from behind me and blows past the line of traffic in the oncoming lane, swerves all over the damn place, and blocks up the road because suddenly they can’t make it up the hill either. HELLO, WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF CLUSTERFUCK, POPULATION TWENTY ASSHOLES AND YOU.
Things settle down for a few moments and people get a bit straightened out, but it’s still pretty awful trying to get up that hill. My primary thought is “I could do everything right, and one of these other assholes is going to get me wrecked, which means stranded in the bitter cold, which means I’m going to KILL THEM AND SLICE OPEN THEIR STOMACH LIKE A TAUNTAUN AND CLIMB INTO THEM FOR WARMTH.”
Since I do not relish sleeping in entrails, I decide, perhaps foolishly, to turn onto a side street.
I say foolishly, because this side street is possibly a bit steeper than the other road, and definitely more snowy. And indeed, I am sliding all over the place. Fortunately, and this is the crucial detail, I am the only car moving on this road. There are cars parked on one side. I’m doing everything possible to not slide into them, or into the road signs on the other side.
I get my car up this hill pretty much by going five feet forward, beginning to slide sideways, stopping, backing up two feet to find road again, and trying forward again. My car’s ESC thingy, which is some sort of stability control, is going bananas, flashing and making horrible noises that I suspect translate as “YOU’RE SLIDING ALL OVER THE ROAD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, STOP!!!”
You know those bad fake-driving scenes in sitcoms where the actors are sitting in a fake car interior and the “outside” is projected on the windows, and the actor in the driver’s seat is basically waving the wheel back and forth in a completely ridiculous and unrealistic way?
That was me. I had no fucking idea which way my tires were pointed, because the direction my car was traveling up that hill had no relation to where the front of the car was. I kept being surprised when I would back up and the wheels turned out to be straight. Score one for me, I guess?
The real problem is that the car is literally inching up the hill. It’s getting no traction. I have it in the lowest gear and am being as light as possible on the gas, and still the wheels slip. There were some women at the top of the hill shoveling out their driveway, and they would periodically stop to gawk at me, that’s how slowly I was moving.
At this point, I’m seriously worried I’m going to have to abandon my car. There is NO going back down the hill into the clusterfuck down there. (I wouldn’t do it facing forward; there’s no way I’m doing it blind in reverse.) It’s taken me nearly half an hour, but I’ve managed to go an entire block, and I can see there’s only one more short block and then the road levels out.
So I chant at the car. It’s a variety of things. Mostly “Come on baby, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, go baby, go baby, go,” interspersed with “Just keep swimming” and “I think I can, I think I can.”
About 45 minutes after I turned off the clusterfuck road, I make it to the crest of the hill. This is a total of maybe 500 feet. (The shoveling ladies smiled and nodded at me.)
Now I can see that in front of me is a downhill, followed by...another, even steeper, uphill.
“OH HELL NO,” says I. So I turn onto another side street that parallels the original clusterfuck road. This one is even deeper in snow, but not nearly so steep. The car moves through this reasonably okay. I manage to maintain a steady 5 miles per hour. I go two blocks on this street (kinda waving at the stop sign, since I daren’t lose momentum on the hill) and get to the super main road (two driving lanes each side, bigass divider up the middle) that goes to my neighborhood.
Funny thing...as I turn onto the main road, I see another car on it, who I recognize as the car that was in front of me in the clusterfuck. I have to say, a 45 minute difficult driving climb with no other cars around is waaaay preferable to a 45 minute clusterfuck.
So the main road, also completely unplowed, is pretty bad driving. Again, slippy and the ESC thing is freaking out. I’m sticking to lowest gear, occasionally popping into 2nd (semi-automatic transmission), but never faster than 15mph. A couple of people in 4WD vehicles come up on my ass and eventually blow past me, apparently annoyed that I’m driving slowing in the right lane in the snow in my perfectly ordinary, not-4WD sedan.
(This is why I don’t and won’t own a gun.)
When I reach a point that would normally be 5 minutes from my house (about one mile), my cell phone rings.
I should ignore it. I know I should. But I also know it’s probably my mother, and if I don’t answer it, she’ll freak out with worry. I’m at a red light, so I pull it out. I see “Mom” on the screen. The light turns green.
I flip open the phone (yes, it’s a clamshell, DON’T JUDGE ME), shout “I’m trying to drive in the fucking snow! I’ll call you when I get home!” and slap it shut and shove it back in my pocket. I proceed through the light.
Twenty minutes later, I turn onto my own street. It’s uphill, but fortunately not too steep. And yes, NOT PLOWED. I get to my house, which is at the top of the hill. I go to back into my driveway, because that will be safer in the morning. It’s a shared driveway, and my neighbor has her car at the front of the driveway, pulled as far to her side as possible (she’s very considerate). There’s about 8 inches of snow in the driveway. It takes a solid five minutes and a bunch of tries, but I manage to muscle the car in reverse through the snow without hitting either my neighbor’s car or the lamppost in my front yard.
I may be parked on my lawn. Not a worry, since it’s only going up to 12 degrees and the ground is hard as concrete.
As I turn off the car, I burst out laughing as all the restrained emotion of the drive home explodes in a huge adrenaline burst. “I don’t know how the hell I’m parked, but it’s GOOD ENOUGH!”
I go inside and call my mother. It’s 2:30, exactly two hours after I set out. I have traveled seven miles.