The Blizzard Drive

December 28, 2015

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We left St. Paul around three in the afternoon. The drive to Green Bay is normally four hours. The weather was fine when we started.

It wasn’t fine for long. A blizzard came in fast — the kind that doesn’t build gradually but drops on you like a curtain. By the time we were past Eau Claire the highway was white and the visibility was nothing. I could see the taillights of the car ahead and that was it. Every few miles someone was in the ditch.

It got worse on the way to Algoma. The highway narrowed and the plows hadn’t come through and the snow was blowing sideways off the fields. We came up behind a small car that had gotten stuck. Then a truck. Then a semi, jackknifed halfway into the ditch, its trailer blocking most of the road.

We stopped. There was nothing else to do. I got out and helped push. Other people got out and helped push. We pushed the small car free, then the truck. The semi wasn’t going anywhere — too heavy, too far gone — so we worked around it. I ended up driving some of the stranded people to their homes. Strangers, basically. But in a blizzard on a Wisconsin highway at night, everyone becomes your neighbor.

We didn’t get to bed until eleven-thirty. Eight and a half hours for a four-hour drive. Jojo was quiet the whole last stretch, just watching the road, trusting me to keep us between the ditches. The house was cold when we got there. I turned up the heat and we stood in the kitchen and looked at each other with the particular exhaustion of people who’ve just survived something that wasn’t quite dangerous enough to be a real story but was too dangerous to be nothing.

We were home. That was enough.