So I'm just back at TOP Secret Underground World Headquarters after a beautiful, halcyon, blissfully domestic, friendly and companionable two weeks and three days in the Finger Lakes with my GF/SO. Just as an aside, I've lately become a huge fan, a convert really, to the manifold ineffable joys of mid-life relationships. Best I've ever had; I am so surprised at finding such happiness at this late stage, when I was well and truly past the expectation of it, that I just seem to cherish and enjoy every minute. The depth and richness of this mid-life happiness is the best gift that my life on the surface of this little green and blue globe has given me so far. If you're middle-aged and lonely, keep trying, is my advice. The rewards can be beyond your imaginings. As I'm sure some of you already know.
But before I get carried away (unless it's already too late for that), back to my subject: Winter travel.
I nearly got killed once, way back in 1977. Driving westward from Hanover, New Hampshire (where I was in college) to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (home) with two people I'd just met through a ride board, we hit a huge oncoming blizzard halfway through Ohio. (A little further north, that very blizzard became famous.) The temperature dropped forty degrees in ten minutes and the wet highway froze solid. Unaware of the change in temperature, I tapped the brakes to test the road—as I'd been doing for hours—and instead of grabbing, nothing happened. The Chevy Blazer we were in was detached from the earth. Agonizingly, it floated free of any input from the steering wheel (a hair-raising feeling I recall too vividly), began to drift sideways, then grabbed again and spun 720 degrees in a series of vicious violent lurches, and came to rest, stalled and suddenly quiet, facing directly forward...
...Just in time, and in just the right position, for me to look into the rearview mirror and see the headlights of the fast-moving semi trailer that was bearing down on us, sliding on that same glare ice, airhorn blaring. I watched it for maybe two, maybe three long seconds before it hit.
The semi knocked the Blazer (an early pickup-based SUV) a hundred yards down the road. The impact broke every window and buckled the frame to the ground. It was burning as we scrambled out the broken back side windows, ran across the freeway dazed and injured, and dove into a snowbank. The flames rose two stories high. On TV at that time, cars exploded with little provocation, but the Blazer (and I keep tellin' ya, I hate irony like that name) burned and burned.
Later, in the police cruiser, the three of us were bleeding copiously all over the seats from head wounds—Jim with a broken neck, nearly unconscious, Christie crying—when the driver of the semi got in the front seat, looked back at us, and said, "Now I'll never get my load to Chicago on time."
What saved us all was pure luck: it's that the Blazer came to rest with the rear of the vehicle facing the semi. If the vehicle had spun and stalled and ended up with either flank or the front facing the onrushing tractor-trailer...well, I saw the destroyed hulk of the Blazer in the junkyard before I left Ohio. As mangled and blackened as it was, still you could see that the rear of the SUV had served as a crumple zone and insulated us from worse injury—the vehicle was compacted like an accordion. The rear axle was practically in the back seat. If If we'd been struck from any other angle, it would certainly have killed one, two, or possibly all three of us. This has long been a certainty in my mind. Dumb chance was our entire salvation, on that subzero midnight out on the black ice.
A Chevy Blazer like the one in which we nearly met disaster. A side impact would have killed at least one of us riding in the car. Photo from AutoTrader.
The blizzard locked us in, there in Ohio. Because there was only one bed left in the 100-bed local hospital, the surgeon who stitched us up took us home, and we lived with him and his wife for three days, snowed in. (He went to work every day on cross-country skis.) On day three, a neighbor of his came to clear his long driveway. The neighbor had about the biggest agricultural tractor I'd ever seen up close; he sat way up high in the heated, glassed-in cab of the tractor in his shirtsleeves, comfortable and warm despite the subzero temperature and blowing snow. The big V-shaped plow fitted to the front of the huge tractor shoved away three and a half feet of snow all the way along the long driveway like a finger through the frosting of a cake.
We were driven to the airport and flew on to Milwaukee. It was snowing hard again, and our plane was the last one to get out that day.
I had no emotional fallout from that trauma...at the time. I took the accident and its aftermath in stride; my head wound healed, my hair where the surgeon had shaved it to stitch me up grew back, and life went on.
Curiously, though, as I've gotten older, it's like the fallout from that trauma, buried in my body for years, began to bloom back out of me. I've gotten more and more anxious about winter travel as the years have worn onward. I've been aware of it as it's happened. It's not a natural anxiety; I believe it's delayed stress from that long-ago event, expressing itself at last.
So I was more worried than I should have been about traveling out to the Southern Tier of New York State last month, in the middle of January...
[To be continued]
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