| Friday, December 19, 2008 |
18:44 - No business like snow business
|
(top) |
Well! That was about the most interesting 5½-hour commute I've ever experienced.
  
In all honesty, I've driven in worse snowstorms. And it was a good deal more pleasant to actually drive in this one than in a Sierra ski-trip blizzard, since I was in a hairy-backed 4WD car with snow tires, as opposed to a gawky Jetta with chains on.
But what made this experience so much more endearing was the fact that the road was full of people who don't have 4WD or snow tires, and thus spent the whole afternoon spinning gaily about the lanes and blocking the rest of us from getting through.
My favorite part of the whole thing was finding myself in the Hackensack River valley, up whose steep sides every major and minor road in the area strikes a confident path. What this means is that as you approach the crown of the inevitable hill, you find yourself slaloming around dozens of econoboxes haplessly stuck at odd angles, headlights goggling in every direction, front wheels spinning uselessly in the blowing drifts. Those of us whose cars can make it with relative ease over such terrain can only sit and stare and fume (and watch in horror as an overambitious van comes hoisting its bulk over the crest of the hill, front wheels tracking well but rear wheels slewing wildly sideways into your lane and missing your car by less than half an inch) until enough people have come surging out of their own cars in a mass of furious helpfulness and heaved the stuck cars out of the path of travel so the rest of us can get through.
Needless to say, this saving grace doesn't always occur. For all I know, that valley is still full of cars who can't claw their way out without slipping back down the sides, like spiders trying to climb out of a toilet that someone keeps flushing.
I'm lucky to have made it out of there via secret back roads (none of which, no matter how obscure, was free of the sad futile clamber at the top). And with a freshly purchased snow shovel, no less.
Shoveling snow is not as fun as anticipated. And I wasn't anticipating a whole lot of fun.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
