The Case Against Snow

I don’t really like snow and here’s why.

My friend Barry and I were going to college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa one winter, but we had driven the sixty miles to Birmingham for a night out with friends. The planned late-night drive back to Tuscaloosa was a common if not exactly prudent practice, after we’d reset into sobriety and semi-alertness with diner breakfast and copious coffee. However there was a winter storm already peppering the region with snow and sleet, so by early evening we realized it was time to cut and run before we got stuck in Birmingham.

We only made it a few miles down the interstate before we encountered a roadblock. The state troopers had closed the highway due to ice and were forcing people to exit and turn around. Cars and trucks were already skidding and swerving on the offramp to the overpass detour, especially as everyone tried to figure out some allegedly smooth way to ease past the troopers and get back on the highway, further clogging up the traffic.

We were in my four-door Chevrolet Cavalier, which certainly wasn’t built for this, but after a lot of cursing and honking and grinding tires on the shoulder, we managed to process through the exit, turn around on the overpass, and merge back north toward Birmingham. This took well over an hour, and it was going on full dark.

We were both desperate to avoid getting trapped in Birmingham, probably because it meant being snowed in with our respective families. So we decided to exit the highway and try the back roads to Tuscaloosa.

This meant getting off Interstate 59/20 and taking Alabama State Route 216, known as the Old Tuscaloosa Highway, until you get to Tuscaloosa, in which case it’s known as the Old Birmingham Highway. I once heard a Tuscaloosa native insist it was the Old Birmingham Highway even in Birmingham, and when I asked why you would get on a highway to the place you were in, he still tolerated no contradiction.

Anyway, this “highway” roughly parallels the interstate and is not particularly isolated or scary, meandering as it does through several smaller towns on the way to Tuscaloosa and/or Birmingham. The highway does feel isolated and scary when you’re driving on it during an increasingly fat-flaked snowstorm, in the dark, in your little lightweight economy sedan with its four extreme economy off-brand tires.

Fortunately the land is mostly flat, though the road, it do wind. We couldn’t just crawl cautiously along because the Cavalier was likely to slip on the snow and the layer of ice underneath if our forward momentum didn’t keep us going. We weren’t flying, but we had to drive fast enough that I was tense, and conversation was limited to profanity and exclamations about how stupid we were for doing this.

My eyes were glued to the road as my hand were glued to the spindly steering wheel. The Cavalier was an automatic, but we found it helped a little if Barry shifted to second gear when the tires started to slip, while I focused on steering and pumping the gas and brake.

After about three hours of this, we’d covered a not quite forty miles. We were fine on gas but short on stamina and losing ground on sanity. Our laughter and profanity become high-pitched and brittle.

Unfortunately, “mostly flat” doesn’t mean “totally flat,” and we got into some normally unthreatening low hills that came with the added danger bonus of a sharp dropoff to the left. And then, as we came around a curve, we saw another car pull out ahead of us from a turn, the first other car we’d seen on the road in hours. And not just any car. This was small pickup truck, which would already be bad news driving on ice, but they also had a refrigerator strapped down upright in the truck bed.

Now I do not believe we had any right to throw stones as to the wisdom of driving at night in this weather on this road, but I am fairly certain this person could have waited to take this refrigerator wherever it was going. Nevertheless, we considered, and decided it best to hang back in case the pickup swerved, fishtailed, or jackknifed cinematically in front of us.

We could tell the fridge was doing things to the pickup’s stability in the snow, as there was a good bit of wobble going on. But the real challenge came when the pickup, and thence ourselves, arrived at the foot of a long, steady uphill stretch, with the left-side dropoff even more pronounced. We decided the only way to get up the hill successfully was by main force, driving as fast as we dared on the approach to bull our way straight up. So we reversed as far as we could on the straightaway.

To our surprise, the fridge pickup ahead took the opposite strategy, instead just trying to claw his way up the hill slowly. This predictably did not work, even as the truck alternated roadsides to give either set of tires some traction on the shoulder. The back wheels sent up plumes of snow and spun helplessly, occasionally catching to send the truck forward a few yards, then spinning again. Eventually the truck gave up and pulled over to the side about a third of the way up the hill, turning on the hazard lights.

Now it was our turn. I gunned the little four-cylinder and off we launched, probably getting somewhere in the incendiary neighborhood of thirty five miles per hour. We zoomed up a quarter of the hill immediately, and then the fun began. Barry furiously worked the shift while I goosed the gas whenever the tires bit, trying to force the car up the hill by will alone. As we passed the truck, a large man in camo hunting winter gear got out and turned to watch us go by. Halfway up the hill, I glanced back in the rearview to see the man waving frantically.

“I think he wants us to stop for him,” I said to Barry.

“We can’t!” said Barry. “If we stop, we’ll be stuck too.”

He was right. We agreed to stop at the top of the hill if it looked like we could get going on the downward side. We kept going, slow but not slowing further, and it seemed like we were on track to summit. That’s when I checked the rearview mirror to see the pickup driver now trotting up the hill , silhouetted in his own headlights and the falling snow, waving a tire iron as he ran.

“He’s coming after us,” I said.

Barry whipped around to look. “Yes he is.” Had the man decided that if he couldn’t make it out, no one would? Was he just bringing the tire iron to help us somehow? I don’t think anyone brings a tire iron to help when there are no tire-related issues to help with. The man looked huge, lit from behind and puffy in his gear. I couldn’t hear him but I imagined him bellowing as he ran up the hill. He looked like a bellower.

I broke a sweat and started pumping the gas harder. “You’re going to flood it!” said Barry.

“I thought that was just when starting up the car?” I replied inanely. Neither of us knew anything about cars. Barry didn’t answer. He just stared out the back windshield at the man, no longer bothering to work the gearshift. I glanced in the mirror again. Incredibly, the man was gaining on us.

I forced myself to ignore the man and drove. I merged my nervous system with the Cavalier, feeling the snow and ice on the road through the tires, my tires. More sweat poured off my brow, enough I had to wipe my eyes. I desperately needed to urinate. Barry started saying “shit shit shit Shit SHIT” in rising tone and volume as he looked back, which didn’t help my state of mind at all.

But somehow we got to an area of roadway where the snow had drifted and piled to the side opposite the dropoff, meaning there was less on the road, meaning the tires grabbed and we shot forward to the top of the hill. We were up and over almost before I knew it, and fortunately the downslope was also straight or I would have zoomed right over the edge of the gully.

Halfway down the hill, I said, “We’re not stopping for that guy.”

“No fucking way,” shuddered Barry.

By comparison, the remaining fifteen miles of the drive were easy rolling. Still very slow, and took us another hour and change, but we made it to Tuscaloosa through the fading snowfall. I dropped Barry off at his place and made it back to my apartment at four in the morning to find my roommate still awake, still drunk, having constructed a colossal snowman outside our door.

As I took the longest and most ecstatic piss of my life, my roommate rambled at me through the bathroom door about what a fun day and night it had been, school cancelled, a massive impromptu snowball fight on the Quad that had to be shut down by the cops, parties all over town, all the bars open and busy, et cetera. He asked me why I came home so late, and I didn’t answer, but I found the replica samurai sword from the mall knife shop that a friend left me when he moved away, and I went back outside and decapitated the snowman with one stroke.