Those words were about all that was going through my mind last night as I completed a white knuckle, 8 hour transit from the Bridgeport, CT ferryport to my home here in Maine last night. To put that in context, Google Maps tells me that the travel time from Bath to Bridgeport should be 4 hours and 22 minutes. The title’s borrowed from a story by another, slightly more famous Mainer, Stephen King. This is from “One for the Road,”
Maine blizzard-ever been out in one?
The snow comes flying so thick and fine that it looks like sand and sounds like that, beating on the sides of your car or pickup. You don’t want to use your high beams because they reflect off the snow and you can’t see ten feet in front of you. With the low beams on, you can see maybe fifteen feet. But I can live with the snow. It’s the wind I don’t like, when it picks up and begins to howl, driving snow into a hundred weird flying shapes and sounding like all the hate and pain and fear in the world.
I think we’re only expected to net something like 8 inches, but it’s like the man says – the wind is a killer. The wind drove the snow into heavy drifts and brought visibility down from miles to yards to feet and, at times, to zero.
Interstate 95 was an unmitigated disaster last night, as literally dozens of cars along the way had lost the highway due to the whiteout conditions and planted themselves deeply down embankments or into heavy plow created drifts. I knew I was in trouble when I saw a big, heavy Maine state plow had itself driven off the road and gotten stuck.
But a few of us simply did what many of the IBMers from Upstate NY have told me they do under similar conditions; drive very slowly, single file, follow the tailights in front of you, and under no circumstances do you stop. High beams are a big no-no not just because of the proximity of other vehicles but because it reflects off the driving snow, blinding you. The truck behind me actually turned off his headlights for a while, choosing just to follow my tailights.
Anyway, I somewhat incredibly found myself pulling into my driveway around 11:30 last night. As it hadn’t been plowed yet, I got stuck about 10 yards in. But the car was off the road, and not the in the mood to bust out the shovel, I turned it off, and headed inside. No lights, seemed a bit cold. Uh-oh. Flicked a switch or two, and sure enough, the storm had killed the power. No power, at the SOG Compound, unfortunately means no heat.
So, in a nutshell, it was an interesting but successful homecoming. Glad to be back in the office, and have a few things I’ll be talking about.
