No Mo' Snow

I sit here on my perch in my corner apartment watching a dazzling winter snowstorm from my floor-to-ceiling windows. Big, fat flakes are falling to the ground. (And the snow is coming down hard too. Heh.)

Some people might say it’s beautiful. (And OK, right now, I’m warm and cozy on the couch in my sweats under an electric blanket drinking hot spiced chai and home two hours early from work and my view does kind of look like what Frosty would see from inside a snow globe.) But if you want to know the truth, I HATE SNOW.

It makes such a mess and is scary to drive in. And the day after, the snow on sidewalks and up against the curb turns brown and gross. It makes dirt stick to your car. Have you ever had to scrape snow and ice off your car while it’s still falling? Ugh!!!

I used to not be this way. I used to think snow was picturesque and I used to be pro-snowman building. This all changed for me on a dreary winter day, December 20, 2006. At the request of my good friend Gator, I will tell you the story. Lean in close…

…As I said, it was December 20, my 24^th birthday. I was working as a receptionist in downtown Denver. The snow started to fall in the morning, and it fell hard. Coloradans are hearty folk and don’t believe in missing work because of snow. I had to do some major arm-twisting with my boss to be able to leave by noon. By then, at least 6 inches of snow had already accumulated and it was still coming down hard. I got in my Acura, got on the highway, and hoped for the best.

It was treacherous driving. A few miles from my apartment, the already slow traffic came to a complete standstill. I moved maybe 6 inches in the first hour. And the snowfall had turned into a legitimate blizzard, a total whiteout. I could only see through a tiny 4-6 inch square on my windshield, and, through that, only the taillights of the car in front of me. My wipers were getting so caked with ice that they were useless against the onslaught. Every 30 minutes or so, I’d roll down the window, lean out as far as I could to grab the windshield wiper and knock some of the ice off with my scraper. The snow was blowing sideways and would whip into my ears and blow my hair all around my face. It was terrifying. I wasn’t able to move, I couldn’t see, I didn’t want to get out of my car for fear of being run over by an out-of-control vehicle, and worse: I was low on gas, low on cell phone battery, and had to use the bathroom.

After at least four and a half hours of being stuck like this, I finally made it up to the intersection where I could turn around. I thought that I might make it home if I took a different route. However, there was an incline to get to the on-ramp to the interstate, and my Acura just couldn’t do it. My car did amazingly well up until that point, but then it just … gave up. It wouldn’t go forward. When I tried to back down, it wouldn’t go backward. I was stuck. And the blizzard was still coming down.

At this point, my memory gets a little fuzzy. It had been about five hours and I was rapidly losing the will to carry on and barely cared what became of me. I resigned myself to living out the rest of my days in a car stuck on the on-ramp.  A police officer appeared and tapped on the window. I rolled it down. He asked me how I was doing. I told him that my car was stuck, my cell phone was dead, I was almost out of gas and it was my birthday. He said happy birthday. (Thanks, buddy.) He asked if I needed help. I’m like, duh.

He got some other cop, and the two of them held onto my arms as we walked down the interstate on-ramp to a police SUV at the bottom.  I got in the back of the SUV, and the two officers, whom I still think of fondly, let me pick the radio station and chatted with me on the 2-3 mile drive home. They couldn’t actually turn into my apartment complex because of the snow. They got as close as they could to the nearest curb. I waved goodbye and walked about a quarter mile through thigh-high snow to get to my front door. My hair was wet and ropy. My clothes were drenched, and when my roommate opened the door, I’m sure she saw a wild look in my eye.

A few days later, I, with the help of some friends, a big jeep, and a tow rope, recovered my car from an impound lot. It had snowed AGAIN after they put it in the lot and it was stuck in ice and had to be jerked out. I almost didn’t make it home for Christmas and, on my move back to Texas, got stuck at a trashy truck stop in Durango on New Year’s Eve thanks to another storm.

Since then, I’ve hated snow. Living through Snowmagedden last year didn’t help. I’ll save that story for another time, but let me just say that I put the ‘crazy’ in stir-crazy.

Dreaming of fruity drinks on tropical islands,

Scarlett