Snow Peeve
Monday, December 30, 2013 at 8:37PM Ok, so this one is personal and limited in scope. Limited, that is, to anyone who drives in the snow belt. Southerners may now go outside and enjoy the nice weather.
A week ago I was driving on the interstate, just after our ice storm. The highway crews had done a bang up job, and I was cruising along behind a minivan at a decent distance at 65 mph. Two pieces of ice, each about a half an inch thick and over two feet square, flipped up off the roof of the van and rotated rapidly for a moment around an invisible axle about eight feet in the air. Then each piece broke into four and crashed to the pavement just in front of my bumper. I don’t think the driver even noticed. If I had been a few feet closer….well, let’s not think about that.
The other day, after a moderate snowfall, I was driving up a secondary highway and saw a car-sized block of snow approach me in the opposite lane. It had wheels like a car and a small porthole cut in the snow in the left front, through which an idiot was peering intently. There was no other break in the snow through which an intelligent human being could see the road, signs, pedestrians, obstacles, or vehicles.
It reminded me of a number of incidents in the past where my car was suddenly engulfed in a momentary blinding whiteout caused by a cubic yard of snow leaving the roof of the vehicle in front of me. Did you know that a car going 65 mph would travel the length of a football field in the few seconds that it would take to get through a snow dump like that and clear the windshield? Anything closer than the opposing 1 yard line would be invisible.
You are undoubtedly way ahead of me on the moral to these stories. Clean off your damned car. The whole car. All the glass. Yes, the roof and the trunk lid too. I know, you’re late. So am I. I am late every time I walk towards my car – it’s congenital. I still take 3 ½ minutes to get my car into a state where it is neither a threat to me nor to others. We drive through this world with a one in 10,000 chance of dying in our vehicles. No need to shorten the odds.
Peeve vented. Thank you.
Reader Comments (2)
Yes! Clean off the whole car!
We had a very close call on Saturday with a 2 ft square Frisbee of ice flying off a car roof and hitting the roof of our car. One half a second slower and who knows!
Driving a car is a privilege and it comes with responsibilities.
Yeah! "Idiot" is the right word for the person and add "ic" for the behavior. I read, with disbelief, some approving comments, and chuckles and snorts, on Facebook concerning the sibling to that four-wheeled-block-of-snow-cum-porthole you spotted. Who knows? Maybe it was the same one. Chuckle, chuckle, snort, indeed. That's. Just. Plain. Dumb. Thanks for venting, and thanks for listening. Oh, and Happy New Year Monsieur l'Heretique.