Snow Tires
It’s amazing what four inches of snow falling during an evening rush hour will do for my perspective. Even though I didn’t return home until after 9pm, I had a good night. The snow was unexpected. The notoriously unreliable Seattle weather people were expecting cold weather with chance of flurries. Prediction of precipitation is very tricky in Seattle. It has something to do with the large mountains and volcanoes that surround the area, as well as the rotations of the planets and their respective moons, and the astrological signs of the weather people’s children. It’s very complicated. I would draw charts but I’m not good with multi-dimension illustrations. The chart I’m thinking of would have at least eleven dimensions with three sub-dimensions for every fifth full dimension. (The string-theory people will know what I’m talking about. The rest of you will just have to accept its complications.) The weather people were right about one part: it was cold.
I had a feeling that snow was in the air. Besides my education in conformity in Syracuse, NY, I also spent much of my time working on a minor in snow studies. I learned the signs, and as I walked outside from a meeting at 4pm, there was an ominous and heavy silence, a sure sign of either impending snow or a large predator in the woods, like a sphinx on the prowl for an early evening supper. The outside was eerily quiet. By the time I went to my next meeting, things were bad and on their way to worse.
The van left work at our normal time of 5:30pm. We drove about one hundred feet past the parking lot when we realized that this was going to be extraordinarily bad. We had a short discussion and unanimously decided to return the van into the parking lot and walk to dinner. A few hours would make a great difference in the volume of cars. I jumped out of the van and directed traffic to facilitate the van’s backing up. (Who says I don’t add value to the van rides?).
The walk to the restaurant was invigorating. It was cold but the snow was perfect: it was wet and thick and stuck heavily to the ground and the trees, forming excellent snowballs and oversized but stable snowmen.
After a vegetarian dinner, we trekked back to the van. This is where it gets weird. After more discussions, we decided to put chains around the rear wheels. This took twenty minutes. Once chained, we started out on the roads, which had emptied in the two hours since we had first ventured out.
Once on the highway, the snow lessoned significantly. We thumped along on the chained tires, the driver pushing the van on the open highway. We were making wonderful time until we grew close to our exit. There was a large crash followed by a sick thumping sound. We slowly made our way to the shoulder where the real men went out to review the damage. (I stayed in the van, trapped in the far back seat—my opinion not asked for or required.) It turned out that the right tire’s chain had caught on the wheel well of the van. This caused the metal rim in the wheel well to bend down over the wheel until the metal rim rubbed on the tire and the chain. Two state police cruisers stopped as we tried to fix the problem. We removed the chains and they encouraged us to go on our way. We left the shoulder slowly and when the thumping grew louder, we tried to pull the van over again. The police would have none of it. There were much worse problems on the road this night, and because of the angle of the metal (it was facing the same direction as the tire spun), they didn’t think it would puncture the tire. They switched on their loudspeaker and made it clear that we could not return to the shoulder. “Stay on target, stay on target!”
The van thumped along and we leaned forward and to the right to try to keep weight off the tire. When we drove downhill or decelerated, there was no noise. Other times it was the loud thumping. The snow returned in force when we finally drove into our neighborhood. One moment we were driving through wet but clean asphalt, and the next snow buried the roads. By the time I walked back to the Castle from the drop off point, the snow was four inches deep and mostly pristine.
For such a long commute home, I was serene and enjoyed myself. It’s sometimes good to put things in perspective; to realize that everything is but a test of character and self, and without “everything,” there would be nothing, and I would be sitting around consternating and complaining all the time. (I’m not going there, don’t worry.)
In other fronts, my mother is angry with me. She has been telepathically communicating her anger. From what I was able to gather from my short telephone conversation with her tonight, she’s angry that I don’t telephone her enough. She was waiting until I called to tell me that, I guess to prove her point. (For the record, I called yesterday to see how everyone was doing, but didn’t get a hold of her.) The truth is I love my mother very much, but I’m not a good caller. The only person I consistently call is Julie. Everyone else is on a monthly schedule. It’s partly that I’m lazy and partly that I don’t have much to say (as evidenced by the thoughts I record on these pages). Her passive-aggressive strategies did impress me. The problem with her strategy, however, was that it may take me a long time to remember to call, leaving her telepathic message unanswered. How am I supposed to feel guilty if I don’t even know I’m supposed to be feeling guilty?
