It’s been slow in regards to nature photography and I’ve been embroiled in other projects, to the detriment of the blog. So I’m digging out an old draft that I almost-completed years ago to fill in a little, until I get some ‘proper’ content going. I should something more topical shortly.
I couldn’t even tell you what brought this one to mind the other day [heh!], so this is a complete non-sequitur, and I apologize for derailing the blog in this manner.
I was 25 when I finally moved out of central New York, and by that time had had my fill of winter weather. The thing is, up there snowstorms are frequent enough that not only do most places of work expect you to be on-time regardless of how treacherous the roads are, but even if you could afford to avoid them entirely, it could mean remaining sequestered in your house for quite some time. Credit to the road crews: at the first accumulation, plows were out and clearing roads, so typically only a blizzard would move fast enough to produce roads that were not drivable, and this wouldn’t last longer than overnight in most cases. You learned how to handle snow, you kept real snow tires (none of this all-weather radial horseshit, which are total shit for snow driving,) and you judged how bad the roads and parking lots were at any given time.
I don’t even have a rough date for this; I can just say I was in my early twenties and was still driving my parents’ Ford Granada, which was not known for its traction. I was making a quick run over to the nearby mall one night, looking for magazines I think. At one end of the mall was a totally unused parking lot which most people just used to cut across to shorten their trip around to the back entrances closest to certain stores, like the Waldenbooks I was after.
It had snowed recently, “a few inches,” but the roads were clear and the mall parking lot had been plowed, so most of what any driver faced was wet asphalt – nothing to worry about. But as I rounded the back side of the mall, I found they hadn’t touched the cut-through parking lot, still pristine under a smooth blanket of white snow. A little slippery perhaps, but a) I already had experience in accumulations of that nature, b) maintaining a straight line usually presented few problems, and c) it was an empty parking lot, with nothing to hit even if I did start to skid or spin or anything – horsing around in snow-covered lots is a winter pastime in most northern states, and even serves as valuable practice in getting out of (or into) skids, learning about the breaking point of traction, and so on. So I just aimed the car across the white blanket and continued on.
No problems for several seconds, until I was reaching the far side (and a plowed, clear section alongside the building itself) when I realized the blanket wasn’t perfectly level. It sloped upwards gently at the end, and I knew what this meant. Plows don’t of course eradicate the snow, they simply push it off to the side, and in most cases this is no longer a fluffy, soft pile, but packed and chunky icebergs with a tremendous amount of resilience to them, often remaining for weeks after the rest of the snow had melted away. Over a period of a few storms, the snow had piled up at the top edge of this parking lot, and when the last storm had passed, it had disguised this ridge, a little under a meter high, under a deceptive slope of new snow, not visible in the night under the parking lot lights until you were close. Directly in my path was a barrier of what I knew to be dense and deep icebergs.
There was nothing for it; my speed was too high, I had already passed V1. I gunned the engine a little in the hopes of simply breaking through, counting on it being not too dense. This was not something I’d practiced.
And with a fierce crunch, the car ground to a halt, mired in the packed snow with the front wheels a solid 15cm off of the asphalt. Remember what I said about the Granada’s traction? It was a rear wheel drive at least and they were still on solid ground, but all they did was spin without the car budging a centimeter. I knew most of the tricks, rocking and slow starts and all that, but none of that was going to shift the front end suspended on a ramp of pack ice. Resignedly, I went into the mall to a payphone and called my dad.
[Yes, this was the eighties. Yes, there was a Hickory Farms stall in that mall. No, I did not own even one item of neon-colored clothing, you little asshole.]
It wasn’t that my dad could do much, given that he was driving a Fiat, I think. He arrived with the snow shovel and the kitty litter (for traction, not because we were stranded so far from facilities,) but these were inadequate for the predicament I’d achieved. We played around a bit, including his own attempts at rocking and so on, but not a damn bit of progress was made. I was quite aware of the potential for catcalls and derision from passing drivers, not long out of high school and in a redneck part of the state where that’s one of the prime activities among youth, but this was the quiet end of the mall and I may well have been being paranoid anyway. Someone else spotted our dilemma and stopped to help, or at least observe, since they were no better equipped than we, and to give you an idea of how bad the Granada was, at one point during our fruitless attempts while my dad was behind the wheel and I was outside to push/shift/direct/stand by helplessly, I heard an odd whirring sound and looked back to see the rear wheels, sitting on wet asphalt, spinning merrily while the car idled in gear, having too little traction to even engage the automatic clutch. Yeah, that would have been a clue as to the folly of picking an unplowed path, but this was one of the factors that told me how bad the car was.
Eventually someone in a large pickup truck happened by. If you have a pickup in NY, you always have tow chains or a strap, you usually have four-wheel-drive, and you carry extra weight in the bed for traction; about 30% or better have mounts for snowplows on the front. These kind gentlemen hooked up to the rear of the car and yanked it effortlessly off of the snow embankment, taking all of three minutes to do it, and I thanked them profusely and gave them some money, a pittance really, for their troubles. I made sure the car could move on its own in the level part of the lot and helped my dad load up the stuff that he’d brought.
“What are you over here to get, anyway?” he asked.
“Nothing, anymore,” I said.
I think he believed I was either scared of driving or too wrung out to consider shopping. “The mall’s still open, you can go get what you’re after,” he pointed out.
“I just gave those guys all my money,” I replied, and got back in the car and headed home.