April, 2019
I rewired the main circuit panel (load center) in my house, recently. Although I was trained as an electrition and have done some house wiring before, a friend came over to make sure things were done right. We decided to go eat and took off for the local Mexican food restaurant after we finished the job. My buddy asked me ahead of time if I was sure I wanted to go. He had been watching the forecast and I hadn’t. It’s a matter of principal for me, I just refuse to listen to some one whose work requires them to be right 50% of the time (weathermen). And I couldn’t let a little snow storm intimidate me.
After dinner, I dropped my friend off at his house and headed out for the 20 mile drive home.
By the way, the defroster in my truck didn’t work. If you are not experienced in cold weather driving, that means that the snow/sleet sticks to the windshield, thicker and thicker over time. At first, I could make out the road because for the first 1/4 mile the road was a gravel road and it hadn’t snowed enough to cover up the irregular texture of the road and my windshield hadn’t iced over yet. But then I had to turn onto a 2 lane, state maintained (or not) asphalt highway. The snow started coming down very heavy about this time and a blanket of snow covered just about everything. I had heard of a white-out but never experienced one, until now. This is a similar view in a similar post.
Before I’d driven a mile, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t distinguish the road from anything else. There were some subtle indicators as to where it was, but they weren’t 100% reliable. More on that later. At first, the windshield was clear and it was the snow driven into the car (or so it seemed) that left about 20 ft of visibility. That’s about 1 car length. Even at the slow, maximum speed of 20 mph, that’s not very far. But as time went on, the windshield became more and more caked with ice until I was left with a 4″ x 10″ area at the bottom of the windshield that I could see through. I thought about stopping and scraping the ice off but feared that I might not be able to get back on the road or that I might get hit by the cars behind me that couldn’t see much better than I could.
Highway signs and mile markers would occasionally show up and would give a rough estimation of where the road was, or should have been. In our area, the road rumble-strip is on the center line and the outside edges are gravel. Both of these give a noisy rumble letting one know that you might be drifting. For awhile. Once the snow/ice gets packed in, you
But, I persevered and on the last stretch, I found my last indicator. I turned onto the gravel road to my house with less than 1/4 mile to go, and as the truck came up the hill, the headlights pointed up causing loss of all visibility beyond the end of the hood of the truck. It’s like using high beam headlights in snow or fog. Since I couldn’t see much out of the 4×10 inch window, anyway, I rolled the side window down enough to look out there. I figured I’d navigate the last little way like that.
Then I noticed corn stubble. Corn stubble is not supposed to be in the middle of a county maintained gravel road. Corn stubble is a 100% reliable indicator that you aren’t on a road. The reason I was seeing corn stubble was
That 20 miles to get home took over an hour.
From your Grumpy Uncle Dave.