Winter Driving

The Utah sun pours down on my cement patio until it's too hot for bare feet. My peony bushes take on a rusty brown patina, no matter how much I water them. Even the shade of the horse-chestnut trees as I take an early morning walk seems sullen with heat. It is high summer here in the desert, and all I can think about is winter driving.

I grew up with a father who was completely fearless when driving his car during the murderous Minnesota winter. It never seemed to occur to him that black ice or cunning slush lay in wait to send him slamming into a snowbank. True, he never drove very fast -- but he never took heed of the elements, either. During cold waves that sent the temperature plunging into the minus twenties or thirties he would carelessly roll down his window while driving so he could smoke one of his innumerable Salems, even while the rest of us in the car begged him for asphyxiation rather than a frozen death. The raging howls of a blizzard were to him but a spring zephyr -- he would throw a pan of boiling water on the windshield to clear off the ice and drive off through the white murk to Aarone's Bar & Grill on East Hennepin to pump suds for the regulars. Coming home late at night from his beery work, often half-crocked himself, he never had an accident on the snow-packed streets. Of course, during the winter, he was often preceded by a friendly snowplow, whose driver had been sampling boiler makers with dad to take the chill off. 

Until I was 27 I never drove a car at all. Up until then I never had to deal with winter driving. I walked or took the bus.  I well remember the April of 1972, when I was a First of May with Ringling Brothers Circus, appearing at Madison Square Garden in New York City. A snowstorm descended on the Big Apple early in April, and while cars crept along at a slug's pace and pedestrians were huddled in creeping masses of misery, I, in my cheap blue Army & Navy Surplus nylon parka, cavorted in Central Park, building snowmen and reveling in the bracing pure air -- such a great relief from the normal New York fug back when the Clean Air Act lacked teeth.

But my enjoyment of winter's delights was nearly extinguished once my wife Amy taught me to drive. Where before winter roads  seemed bucolic and inviting, they were now revealed to me as death traps -- just waiting to lure me onto a patch of invisible black ice. 

Some thirty-five years ago you could still put chains on your tires for winter traction in some Midwestern states. Getting them on was an operation fraught with tension and the temptation to use every bad word the Good Book proscribed -- and then some. First you laid out the chains, which formed a sort of horizontal ladder on the ground, and then you slowly backed over them until the tire was in the middle of the 'ladder.' Then you tried to wrap the chains around the tire and hook them together. It normally took me at least a dozen attempts per tire. By the time I had them on my back felt like the Rockettes had been performing on it, in stiletto heels. This was somewhat alleviated by the cheerful jingly sound the chains made as they bit into the compacted snow and ice of the road. I liked that sound when I was driving; it was the song of safety. But then state legislatures had to butt in to protect our sacred highways and byways by outlawing tire chains.

With a large family and a small income, buying winter tires each year was not always in the cards. I often had to navigate icy winter roads with tires as bald as Yul Brynner. It was more like skiing than driving. From November until April my knuckles stayed a milky white, from gripping the steering wheel so hard. 

And then there was the matter of starting an old clunker on a below-zero morning. I never had the luxury of a garage for the family jalopy. I kept a case of those yellow plastic bottles of Heet in the trunk, always pouring one into the gas tank in the evening if Barry ZeVan the Weatherman predicted an arctic sunrise. 

Most winters I invested more in Heet than I did in hot chocolate for the entire family.

I could never bring myself to dash a pan of boiling water onto the windshield like my dad, so I went through a variety of metal and plastic ice scrappers -- none of which ever seemed to do more than rearrange the thick frost into fiendish whorls that wouldn't disappear until I'd had the car running and the heater on for twenty minutes. And the winter grime that would collect on the windshield in a matter of minutes when I was on the freeway rarely budged when I turned on the windshield wipers, no matter how much of that blue fluid I spritzed on. 

Oh, and did I mention frozen car locks? Many a frigid morning the car door locks were frozen shut. Of course, I always kept a can of WD-40 for just such emergencies -- but I kept it inside the car, and if all the locks were frozen . . . well, you get the picture. I had to string together every pickin' extension cord in the house so I could run Amy's electric blow dryer to thaw out a lock -- risking electrocution in the process as the extension cords sank into the snow. 

But it wasn't all torture:  Driving out on Larpenteur Avenue with all the kids to look for a pungent pine to set up in the living room for Christmas. On the way back the magnificent turpentine fumes from the warming tree made us all a bit giddy, so we yodeled carols like Fred Waring's Young Pennsylvanians. There were occasional forays out onto the ice in the car at White Bear Lake, where my Uncle Jim kept a fishing shack during the winter fishing season. The kids didn't relish the fact that there was only two feet of ice between them and a watery grave, but I made light of it to such an extent that they would eventually start sliding about on their bellies in their snow suits while I vainly tried to inveigle so much as a single bony perch to take a meal worm. Driving back home I inevitably stopped at Bridgeman's for hot fudge sundaes. I had a deal with a waitress named Cindy -- for a generous tip she always made sure our sundaes had more hot fudge than ice cream. You haven't lived unless you've had a bowl of Bridgeman's hot fudge, with a dab of vanilla ice cream in the middle! 

The best part of winter driving was when I didn't have to do it. Sitting around the TV with Amy and the kids on a brisk winter's night, watching "The Adventures of Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn for the umpteenth time, with a bowl of Orville Redenbacher and mugs of Swiss Miss -- knowing there was nothing to force me out into the bitter night to face extinction on those uncertain roads -- that's a happy feeling I still recall today. When it's 97 degrees in the shade.