Sunday we had a pretty good blizzard. By Monday things had calmed down but there was still snow on the side roads and patches of it on the highways. I'm taking the new highway 20 East towards I-35. Just past the exit for Kamrar I am in the left hand lane getting ready to pass another vehicle and this patch of snow shows up. There are tire tracks running through it so there are dark and light stripes. I pick the ones that I think were made by previous traffic, as opposed to the stripes left in between, but just as I get to it I realize I have chosen wrong. The car starts rotating off course. First it drifts a few degrees to the left, and then a few degrees to the right (perhaps in reaction to my trying to control it) and then we regain traction and zoom! Off the road and into the ditch. The whole thing took about two seconds.
I call 911 on my wife-mandated cell phone and they tell me they'll send someone along. Before too long a highway patrol car shows up and tells me to bring my stuff. The snow is a foot or two deep. I look at the 20 feet to the road through the deep snow, and the 100 feet up the track left by my car, and I hump my big, fat suitcase up the longer, car-plowed route.
We're heading down the highway when we get passed by a tow truck, which annoys Officer Friendly. Seems that tow truck company is not supposed to operating in this area, so he calls another tow company and arranges for them to come tow my car. We take the next exit and double back to my car. There are patches on snow on the road and the Crown Victoria gets a little squirrely, but just for a fraction of second. I wonder if rear-wheel drive cars are more stable in situations like this, or whether I just happened to hit a really bad patch. Whatever. We get back to my car and I hump my suitcase down the plowed track and stow it in the trunk.
Tow truck shows up and instead of pulling me out backward, which I thought would be the logical, easy thing to do, he digs down in the snow by the left front wheel until he can get a hook on something underneath. I ask him about this and he tells me that pulling the car out backward would pull the plastic nose piece off of the car. I can believe that. He proceeds to start dragging my car sideways. I would have thought this would be a fairly smooth operation, but it's more like a series of tugs. Eventually I figure out that periodic movement is related to the tow truck rocking on it's tires. The winch winds up putting tension on the line and taking up all the slack in the truck's suspension, tires and whatnot. Eventually the tension becomes high enough to overcome the resistance from the wall of snow and the car moves, where upon the line goes slack-ish, the truck rocks forward on its suspension and the whole process is repeated.
You might think that it would go smoothly from here on, but no. The driver had to re-position his truck half a dozen times. At one point my car is parallel to the road, the truck is pulling at maybe a 30 degree angle, but the car persists in going straight ahead, heading right for one of the steel roadside marker poles. It would be a crime to run into that now since so far we have no real damage. The driver resorts to pulling out into the highway, which finally gets me on the shoulder.
The bill was $200 plus $14 tax, and they don't take American Express. I thought it was a little high for 30 minutes work, but he did crawl around in the snow, and he got me out in time for me to catch my flight.
I saw at least two dozen cars stuck in the snow off to the side of the road. Most of them looked like they had been there since yesterday (they had red or yellow tags stuck on them). Officer Friendly told me he had 25 cars stuck just today. I wonder whether the that errant tow truck was really the cause of my getting instant service, or because I told him I had a plane to catch and he figured, hmmm, airline traveler, has at least $2, probably willing to pay a premium to get his car unstuck, I'll call Willy. Or maybe it was: airline traveler, a delay for him is going to be a real pain. Ordinary folk can afford to hang around for a bit, but it will cost this guy real money. Who knows? I maybe could have saved us all the fuss if I had told them up front that I had a plane to catch, but at the time (I'm not dead!) it didn't seem all that important.
That patch of snow that sent me in the ditch? That was the last patch of snow I saw on the road. All the way to I-35 and then South to Des Moines and the airport the road was perfectly dry.
Coming into Des Moines I happen to look at the gauges and notice that the needle on the temperature gauge is right at the top. I figure I better pull off and take a look. I do not want to stop on the side of the road: if the engine dies I don't want to be stuck there, so I drive on looking for a gas station or something. Naturally there is nothing, nothing but big highway interchanges. I go through two before I finally find something that looks promising. Well, there are businesses, but no gas stations. I head off sideways and come across a convenience store. I open the hood and discover that the whole space between the grill and the radiator is packed with snow. Doh! Snow has even come up behind the radiator and clogged the electric fans. (I knew there was a reason I didn't like electric fans.) I'm looking for a stick or some kind of tool that I can use to dislodge the snow but the only thing I can find is my comb. I poke and prod at the snow I can reach and I let the car sit with the hood open for 10 or 15 minutes. This is enough because the temperature gauge falls to the middle and stays there all the way to the airport.
It is 30 minutes to flight time and there is a line six people long at the Dollar counter, so I drop the keys on the counter and say Hi and Bye to the clerk and head to the ticket counter to check my mighty suitcase. It's 15 minutes to flight time when I get to the gate but they have not started boarding due to some kind of foul up, so I'm good.
P.S. It now occurs to me that the little ride from Officer Friendly may have just been a chance for him to evaluate my mental state, and when he discovered I was shaken, but not stirred, he decided I was competent to resume my travels, and so dispatched the tow truck. If I hadn't of passed his evaluation I would have found myself sitting in a truck stop.
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