Portales,
NM, January 22, 2015, 7:28 AM.--- As I write, powdery
snow continue to shower outside my house slowly covering my car, and the
driveway. The forecast is that it will be snowing the whole day so I imagine
that by noon my car will be melded with the driveway into one continuous form
of white landscape.
My first winter in New Jersey, January 2004.
This is not my first
snowy winter in America. A major portion of my first 4 years in the US was
spent in New York – New Jersey area. I can still remember the excitement and
the exhilarating experience when I first saw and touched a snowfall. They were
fluffy like feathers in my hands. But when my car started skidding and sliding
and became less manageable as I drove, I realized that winter is not my
favorite season after all. It was there in New Jersey where I learned the rules of driving on a
snowy road: No sudden braking or turning, slower speed, keep a fair amount of
distance from the car ahead of you, et cetera, et cetera.
Twelve years later, just a day after we welcomed the new year, I had to retrieve those rules from my mental hard drive. I was driving my way back from from Loma Linda, California where I spent the Christmas break with my wife. By late afternoon as I was approaching Albuquerque along I-40, white powdery mists started hitting my windshield. By sunset, snow shower started to intensify reducing road visibility that I decided to exit as I saw a sign of a gas station. There was only one vacant space in the station’s parking area and all the cars parked there were already covered with snow. As I parked, I searched my GPS for a hotel where I can spend the night and learned that the nearest hotel is 9 miles away. I cannot risk going back to the highway and drive 9 more miles so I decided to just spend the night in my car. The snowfall abated by midnight.
Early in the morning I resumed driving. Traffic was slow as cars formed a single line on the outer lane of the interstate where the pavement was still visible. As I took the exit in Santa Rosa for the last leg of my journey, I did not expect to meet my hardest challenge as a driver so far. Portales was still 100 miles away. Coming from a busy highway like the I-40, I had some eerie feelings when I realized that I was driving alone on that barren piece of snow-covered highway. No tire tracks were visible. If there were some vehicles who passed there before me, the evidence of passing wheels were easily covered with continuous snow shower. In fact you cannot see the outlines of the road. Your only guide were the few road signs sticking out on the sides like emaciated snowmen.
I kept my speed at around 35-40 mph when I realized
that there were two vehicles behind me. They must be driving faster because
they got closer and closer. I expected them to pass me by my left but that did
not happen. Instead they got closer---too close to me for comfort.
Automatically, I increased my speed to 45 and that’s when I started skidding. I
never expected that on the third day of a new year, I would experience the greatest scare of my
life for the entire year! First my car veered 90 degrees to the right then
veered 180 degrees to the left before correcting itself back to its original
position. All these while, my car was still moving on the forward direction of
the road before it exhausted its linear momentum and stopped.
The two cars that were tailgating me must have slammed on their brakes for they parted to opposite directions. The one closest to me---an Acura SUV---fell, buried on the right side of the road and stuck. The other has turned left onto the middle of the road. I felt guilty that I caused the accident. So I got out of the car and started walking towards them to see if I could be of any help. The two cars must be traveling together because the drivers seemed to know each other and had conversations. That’s when I heard the first driver telling the other that he had a shovel in his cargo bay. Then three passengers---all men--- stepped out and started pushing the vehicle. I wanted to come near to apologize but then I realized that it was their tailgating that caused me to skid in the first place. And considering that they have more than enough helping hands and that I could not be of much help to them, anyway, I went back to my car and continued driving.
When I told my wife later
over the phone about my near-mishap, my mother-in-law butted in telling me that
God must have protected me because she prayed for my safety. I believed her. I
mean, I prayed, too, but I always consider my mother-in-law closer to God than
I am so that it must be through her prayers that God spared me.
Approaching Portales, I could see that the snow cover
was thicker here than the areas I passed by.
As I turned right from the road onto the alley that connects to my
driveway, I got stuck. Fortunately, or because of my mother-in-law’s prayers
again, an angel with a midsize snow plow was standing by. No, he was not really
standing by---he was busy clearing the parking lot of a furniture company next
to my yard.
The angel with a snow plow who helped extricate my car from a mound of snow.
He came to me and with the help of two other men
passing by, they helped me extract my car from that mound of snow. Then with
his snow plow he cleared the alley including the entrance to my driveway. My
driveway, which had not been used for two weeks, was covered with about a foot
of snow and my car could not move any closer to the house than at the entrance
that was cleared by the angel with a snow plow. But that was good enough.
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