Snow

Many years ago when I was in college and still driving that pumpkin orange AMC Gremlin, I set out for the Christmas holiday back home, normally a 90-minute drive. It was right around Calimesa on Interstate 10 that I came over a rise and was dumbfounded to find snow in front of me as far as the eye could see. The traffic slowed to a stop. This was Southern California; and no one knew how to drive in the snow. So we just sat in our cars, the engines and heaters running, because it was verry cold. The afternoon turned to evening and eventually the evening light slipped into darkness. A few hours later, my car stopped running. I’m not sure if it ran out of gas or if the battery just got too cold to restart. So I pushed the Gremlin to the side of the road with the help of some of my freeway neighbors, and discovered that in the car behind me was a woman that I knew from church. She had been visiting a friend in the hospital and was on her way home when she got stuck in the snowstorm. She was crying and her hands were trembling and she appeared to be very happy to see me. She grabbed my hand through the window of her car and asked if I could drive her car home. I didn’t play coy. I said you ‘betcha!’ So I took note of where we left my car, and climbed in behind her steering wheel. Finally the Highway Patrol took us as a caravan, single file through the snow to unobstructed freeway. It was nine hours after I began the trip that we pulled up to my parent’s house to let me out.

As I listened to the reports this week of heavy snowfall in the Northeast, I successfully defeated any romantic notions about sleigh bells in the snow. My one experience of December snow on a Southern California freeway was enough to last me a lifetime.