Extreme Snow Adventures

The reason I have not been duly engaged on Vocal this week is that I got overwhelmed with work and of course the Thanksgiving break.

I spent a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with my friends and was supposed to drive out of Erie, PA to Toronto on Friday around noon. It started snowing heavily around 6 am and by noon the snow was knee-deep. My friend Jim had shoveled the snow by hand three times by then, soaking wet and excitedly tired (he loves snow).

I had to finish reviewing an article for a peer-reviewed journal and when I was ready to leave a little after noon, my car was completely covered in snow. In the cover picture for this story, it stands closest in the driveway.

I had to ask a neighbor across the road to help dig out my car as he had a snow removing machine. As I was leaving, more snow was coming and the forecast for Erie was that it would be snowing all weekend, dumping unprecedented volumes of fluffy wetness on the city.

I put the news radio on, to keep up with the weather updates. While I was driving out of the city, an alert came in that I-90 was closed for the commercial vehicles. It also had major slowdowns that prompted my GPS to reroute me to US-5.

US-5 is a beautiful scenic road that runs along the Lake Erie shore in Pennsylvania and New York. The lake effect snow was dumping on it to the extent that no snow plows could keep up with cleaning it. But at least it was not freezing on the road, so driving was just a matter of moving slowly and carefully. The video below from my BlueSky account shows what it was like on the road.

The radio news was full of alerts, warning people to avoid driving unless in emergency, and not to go on I-90. There were a few cars on US-5, I guess those who stayed at home were smarter than me. On the other hand, in retrospect if I stayed in Erie I would have been stuck there even now as the city is still under snow emergency.

I was driving at 10-15 mph, and the weather alerts kept repeating that it cleared up around Dunkirk. The distance between Erie and Dunkirk is about 50 miles and what was supposed to be a one-hour drive at the most turned into 2.5 hours of nearly blind slow driving, due to low visibility and loads of falling snow. What you see on the hood of the car in the video was fresh snow I picked up after I had cleaned it while we were digging it out.

Somewhere along the way, around Forsyth, NY, the road was slightly curved and going up the hill. My Nissan Kicks is a front-wheel drive only, so I was afraid that it wouldn't handle fluffy snow up the hill. On the curve, I tried to go around a large stalled truck and got stuck myself. My car refused to go either back or forth.

I got out of the car to check what was going on. Right in front of the stuck 18-wheeler, there was a low-sitting sports car (I didn't register the model but it looked like a Nissan 2-door sports car), stalled perpendicular to the road. It literally stopped the traffic as the truck was stuck behind it and the cars on the other side could not pass because of it either.

About 5-6 people from other stalled cars gathered around the sports car, trying to figure out how to get it unstuck. The driver took out the floor rugs and put them under the wheels, to create more traction and we tried to push the car. It wouldn't move.

Luckily, there was a tractor with a snow plow in front of it, working hard to clear the road and get the truck moving. It couldn't do anything for the sports car, though, so I joined other people in trying to push it off the road. On the sixth or seventh attempt, we finally pushed it to the curb.

While we were pushing the car, I noticed that the driver had no winter clothing on him. He was wearing a flannel shirt and light khaki pants.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked, looking at his frozen hands.

"I am," he responded, "and I have no winter clothes. I was just hoping to get home today."

"Where's home?"

"Virginia Beach."

"Oh wow," I said, mapping the road in my mind. "How did you end up here?"

"We were driving from Cleveland, and heard on the radio that I-90 was closed. So we had to re-rout."

"And you went up north?" I asked, incredulous. "Why not go down to I-80?"

"It was impossible from where we were, the road south was closed. And it was supposed to be only for about ten more miles of this," he smirked.

While we were talking, the tractor driver chained the truck and tried to get it moving. It bent and nearly broke the iron bar at the back of the tractor that they hooked the chain to, but the truck did not budge. The tractor driver called in more snow plows for help.

I asked the sports car driver if they had enough gas to keep themselves warm until the help arrives and he said yes, they would be fine. Then I asked the tractor driver if he could help me out. "Not without damaging your car," he responded matter-of-factly.

Meanwhile, the other stalled drivers were trying to figure out how to clear the road off the stalled vehicles. Mine was a major obstacle. So they decided to try pushing it out. One of them was kind enough to take the wheel and drive my car out to the stretch that was cleaned by the plow tractor. I was pushing it out with three other guys, and it wasn't as hard as with the sports car.

I hopped back into my car and waved thanks and good-bye to everyone. They were all happy to have one less stuck car to deal with. I was thankful for the people who are ready to help strangers in these conditions.

The whole ordeal lost me another fifty minutes. There was another part of the road, near a traffic light, where I nearly got stuck again. But I was lucky enough for the light to change for me not to make a stop that would have been hard to get out of on the hill.

The forecast was right: after Dunkirk, it almost miraculously cleared up. Not heavy snow but only little flurries, and the roads were clean. The rest of the drive was uneventful, except for the expected slowdown at the border check point and unexpected heavy traffic on Queen Elizabeth Way. I got to my friends' place in Toronto at about 8 pm. We had nice dinner with my friends and I went to bed early.

Saturday was a wonderful day with my friends in Toronto: we went to see Moana 2, walked around a little, and went to the sauna and swimming pools in their apartment complex. It was a nice and relaxing day before the long drive home.

On Sunday, knowing that I-90 and US-5 were still closed in many places, I decided to take US-62 south and then go west to north-western PA where I live. It took me a lot longer, and with the delays on the border crossing and slow movement on the local rural roads I was home only by 7:30 pm. The video below is another snowy drive from Buffalo to Gowanda, NY, but it's nothing compared to my drive on Friday.

Why, would you ask, so much extreme driving in just two days? - Because my good friends in Toronto may be moving out of there soon and because I wanted to see them before the year ended. Friendships are important to keep up and great friendships are worth every effort.