The Drive of Doom

Let me state here, for the record and right now: going to class this morning was a bad idea. If I would've known what I was in for, I wouldn't have even attempted to leave the house.

First of all, yes, I'm fine. The car is fine (though she didn't necessarily like the drive). I made it to and from campus, though it wasn't easy, safe, or pleasant.

So. As you folks know, the snowstorm hit from Tuesday morning until late Tuesday night, finally stopping around, oh, 3AM on Wednesday. I didn't have to leave the house this morning until 8AM. Even if the plows, salt trucks, and whatever other facilities Kansas DOT has at its disposal to treat the roads waited until the storm stopped completely to do anything to the roads, that means there was still approximately twenty-nine hours in the interim from the time the storm stopped to the time I had to leave the house to get roads and highways cleaned off and passable. Therefore, by the time I left the house this morning, there was no excuse whatsoever for every road I had to drive on to still be as absolutely godawful terrible as they were.

I gave myself about ten or fifteen extra minutes total. I didn't think I'd need much more than that, really; I knew it would take a little bit longer than usual to get out of Newton, and I knew the car would take a few more minutes than usual to warm up, even though it had been in the garage -- it was still in the low single digits outside when I left the house this morning, and never got above 10 all day. I assumed this. I expected this, so I prepared for it.

Newton was, and is, a nightmare. The main roads have been plowed maybe once, and it looked like they hadn't been touched after that plowing, which was probably on Tuesday during the storm itself or early yesterday morning. Nothing had been done to them otherwise. No salt, no brine treatment, nothing -- maybe a little sand when they had plowed, but nothing else. As a result, from people needing to drive on those roads to go back and forth, to and from work, every street in Newton -- every street, even the main roads -- were solid sheets of snow and packed ice where unless you have spiked tires or chains on your wheels, you can't get any reliable traction whatsoever, and once you're moving, you stay moving until the snow/ice wants to let you stop. The laws of motion and inertia greatly applied in this scenario. Need to stop at a stop sign or a light? Hope you're not going faster than 10mph, or you will not be able to. I know this well myself, of course, and I was lucky; I have good brakes, but even going 10-15mph, my car would not stop and I slid through two different stop signs. Nobody was around, thankfully. The one stoplight I hit on the way out of town, I prepared for and slowed to a 5mph or so crawl before getting up to it, and was able to stop. It wasn't easy to get going again, though.

Before I continue, I want to state something briefly -- if you own what your auto insurance company classifies as a "sports car," even though it's eighteen years old, has 231,000 miles on it, and is front-wheel drive, it's classified that way for a reason -- and that reason is primarily horsepower and torque. My Monte Carlo has 215hp and a shitload of torque (I'm not sure exactly what). I've done the research; the baseline, stock Camaro for the year my Monte Carlo was made is basically the same car with a different drivetrain and wheelbase. The Monte Carlo, at least the Z34 version I have, is, when it gets down to it, pretty much the same car with front-wheel drive and a different body. On snowpack and ice? It doesn't matter how much horsepower or torque you have; if your foot isn't light as a feather on the gas and brake pedals, you'll end up in the ditch just the same. Accelerate all you want, you'll still go the same speed; all that will change is that your tires will spin faster beneath you. If you don't brake like there's a fresh egg between your foot and the brake pedal, at all times, you won't be able to stop until the laws of physics let you stop. Driving any car on snowpack and ice takes patience and finesse, but driving a car like mine on snowpack and ice takes all that and more -- it takes skill and experience as well.

So. I made it up to the interstate in about ten minutes, crawling through the streets and dodging people who were going way too fast for the road conditions. I figured that, if anywhere was clear and traffic would be traveling normally, it would be the interstate -- I mean, the DOT has to keep the interstates as clear as possible, right?

Apparently not.

I-135 was not that much better, at all, than the Newton city streets were -- except here there's a new variable -- people who expect to be driving 75 at all times, as well as massive tractor-trailers everywhere as well. 135 was an absolute mess. Yes, there were clear spots...here and there, anyway. It had obviously been treated and plowed at least twice, but that didn't seem to help much. I didn't get above 50mph the entire drive down to the 53rd street exit, where I get off to go to West campus -- and neither did many other people, really. Even going as slowly as I was (comparatively speaking, anyhow), I still fishtailed a little bit here and there. Not big-time, mind you, but enough to where I could feel it and adjust for it. I saw no less than four cars spun out in the median or on the sides of the interstate/off-ramps for the first ten miles or so of my drive down the interstate. You have time to notice those things when your top speed can barely be above 45mph or so.

By the time I got to my exit which would take me over to West campus, the interstate was a little bit clearer and more manageable. I could actually see asphalt in most places again, which was good. This gave me hope. I knew the further south I drove, the less severe it would be -- Newton got about a foot of snow, but the Wichita area got a few inches less.

Well, apparently I was wrong.

For those of you who know the area (so, like, four of you reading this), to get from Newton to West campus, the easiest way is to get off at the 53rd street exit in Park City, a suburb of Wichita, and then drive west through Park City all the way out to Maize, which is where West campus is. So, I drive about fifteen miles south and then about another twelve or so directly west. South and west of Wichita proper got less snow, so again, I was hoping the roads would be better down there than they were up here. They weren't.

Park City was as bad as Newton -- it had maybe been plowed once, and certainly hadn't been properly treated. The snowpack and ice was so thick on the streets that you couldn't tell where the lanes were -- it was all just one big, slick sheet of ice in all directions, like a stretched-out skating rink. There are two stoplights I hit in Park City -- one about half a mile into the city, in front of the police station, and the second about three miles further down, at the intersection which takes me out to Maize. The first one is at the bottom of a downhill slope. As you can imagine, downhill slopes are really fucking dangerous when the entire road is a thick sheet of ice.

About, oh, 100 yards out from the stoplight, I saw it turn green. This mattered not, as at my speed downhill (about 25) I wasn't concerned; I know approximately how long that light stays red or green at that hour of the day, and I calculated in my head that I'd get right through it before it turned red. Except, well, I didn't. About 30 yards out, it turned yellow. I braked to slow down, and, well, didn't slow down, because...ice. With about a second to spare, I said "fuck it" and bore down on the accelerator -- in retrospect, a terrible idea, but it got the job done. Terrified that I was going to slam into someone or they'd slam into me, I spun my wheels and slid gracefully through the intersection juuuuust as the light turned red above my head when I went under it. If there'd been anyone directly in front of me who was turning off or who had braked to stop for the light, there's a good chance I would've gotten into a major accident and could've been killed or at least seriously injured.

It was about this time where I considered just turning around and going back home, emailing my students to tell them that it was too bad to drive in there to teach, but as I was already more than halfway to campus at that point, it didn't really matter. If I'd wanted to make that decision, I should've done it before I'd gotten out of Newton.

The roads didn't get better. As I've said before, the drive out to West campus is usually a long, quiet and peaceful one, on two straight-stretches of several miles each with nothing but fields and farms on either side of me for as far as the eye can see. The problem with that in the winter is that those are the roads that don't get treated, the ones that are sort of left to their own devices to drift over or otherwise remain terrible. I could tell that 53rd street (the road through Park City, all the way out to Maize about ten miles away) had been plowed once, but that's about it. Just like Newton. Once I get out there far enough, with nobody and nothing else around me, if I go off the roads into a ditch or field, nobody would find me if I couldn't get the car back out. So, I drove slowly. Carefully. 35-40 where the speed limit was normally 55 (and, in normal weather and road conditions, I go about 65 or so since there are no cops out there anywhere).

The last leg of the drive is a shorter one; I turn off on a street called Tyler, which takes me up to the street that the West campus is on. Tyler is also a long straight stretch for about, oh, three miles, and leading up to the intersection with Tyler and 53rd, people crossing 53rd have to stop. I don't, but they do. Luckily, there was no one around when I got down there, because even slowing down far in advance to about 20 or so, I couldn't slow down enough to make the turn, and began sliding. Diagonally. Right past Tyler. Into the other lane, going towards a deep ditch.

I was able, luckily, to right myself before I went into the ditch, get back into my lane, and drive a little further down 53rd to turn around and go back up to Tyler. This time I slowed down waaaay slow, to about 10mph or less, and easily made the turn. Obviously, though, this should give you some idea of how fucking terrible godawful the roads were. Even though they're old, my front tires have good tread on them, and my back tires are practically new. This matters not when it's this terrible on the roads.

After that, I got to West campus without incident and taught my class. 8 of my 12 students were there, which is pretty good for a day where the roads were this bad and the temperature was in the single digits. With biting wind chills. I apologized to them profusely, saying that if I had any clue that the roads would still be as bad as they were, I wouldn't have held class -- apparently, I had too much faith in the Kansas DOT.

Wichita, apparently, after making a big press statement saying they were ready for the storm to roll in, had run out of salt for the roads; they had to get more shipped down from Hutchinson. It's not like it mattered anyhow, really; what they needed to do more than anything else was plow the damned roads and streets more than once -- make that metal shovel scrape the pavement for twenty miles at a time, not just take a thin layer on top. Salt/brine/sand -- none of that's going to help when it's in the single digits outside. Snow melting stuff stops working when it's below about 15 degrees or so.

Of course, my students all had their own opinions on what should/shouldn't have been done when it came to school closings and road treatments. All of us were in agreement that the university should've remained closed at least today as well -- just because the grounds crews were able to clean the parking lots enough to clear spaces doesn't mean people can still get to the campuses safely. As mentioned above, it if wasn't for a few spates of luck this morning on my way down to campus, I could've been killed. Easily.

The first 23 years of my life, I lived in West Virginia, where two-foot snowstorms every other week or so is standard and commonplace throughout the winter -- and on mountaintops, at that. In all of those years, with all of those storms, only maybe three or four times had I seen worse road conditions there than I saw here today. That's saying something. People give West Virginia a lot of shit over a lot of different things, and most of it is warranted, but they do treat and clear off the roads as much as possible there when there's a bad storm that rolls through. When I was an undergraduate student at WVU many years ago, the university wouldn't close down for snow unless there was a state of emergency in effect. They're a little more lenient on that now, but still -- you get a foot of snow in Morgantown? Tough; WVU more than likely isn't closing. Public schools may close or be delayed, but not the university. Most of the time, anyway. Here, apparently, a foot of snow means the university will close down for at least two days, public schools will shut down for most of the week (there are still some public schools closed for tomorrow, even) and the roads barely get treated at all.

From all reports I've seen, roads in Wichita proper aren't much better, and in many cases are just as bad or worse. Facebook is full of friends and coworkers saying they couldn't get out and/or were very close to being in accidents because of the roads. I would like to have seen how many people -- students, faculty, and staff all combined -- actually made it to campus safely today for classes. I'm guessing it wasn't half of the university's population. While I realize that the university loses a lot of money for each day they have to shut down, when they're still open and roughly half of its workers and students can't get to campus anyhow, is it really doing any good?

However, if we get another snowstorm next week or the week after, or who knows when anytime between now and when spring actually decides to arrive and stay for good...we'll need those cancellation days then. Perhaps I'm being a little too shortsighted.

The drive home was mostly uneventful, actually. Knowing how bad the roads were between here and school already, I centered myself and took even more extra time on the way back, and didn't have any sliding or fishtailing situations. 135 going north, actually, was mostly clear and dry for most of my drive home until I got back up closer to Newton again, where it remained icy and snowpacked. I arrived home without incident, at which point I immediately put the car in the garage again to keep it warm, as it's still in the single digits outside (and, also, to get all the snow/gunk on it to melt and fall off of it). It's now really clear to me that once the weather clears up and stays cleared up, I need to take a few dollars in quarters over to the car wash and scrub her down -- she looks like a junkyard shit on her, what with all the dirty snow and road grime she got on her today alone.

Adding insult to injury (ahem, so to speak) there are snow chances every day throughout the next few days. The next storm system, which they're apparently naming "Winter Storm Orion," will sweep through here late in the weekend and into Monday (the 10th, 11th, and 12th, according to the current prediction maps on Weather.com) and could give us nothing, or could give us another 4 inches based on what info is out there right now. Nobody out here in Kansas is really talking about it yet, so we'll see. Next week is going to be hectic enough anyhow what with Valentine's Day coming up, Daisy coming down on Wednesday night, and my need to make up two classes' worth of missed lessons and assignments due to the cancellations this week. The last thing I want/need is more snow to throw more proverbial wrenches into gears. My drive down to campus today traumatized me enough to where I really don't want to leave the house anymore already.

No more news on the paycheck front, though I didn't necessarily expect to hear anything today from anyone. I would imagine the administrator will give me an update tomorrow -- who knows if she (or anyone else in the English department, let alone the payroll department) was even able to make it in today, what with the roads as they were. In the meantime, Daisy is going to do the wire transfer in the morning anyhow, so that I'll at least have some money to pay my bills with. At this point, I've basically accepted that I'm not going to have any of my actual paycheck money in the bank one way or another until at least a week from tomorrow. Even if I pick up a paper check from the university on Tuesday, if it's even done and ready then, it'll still take an average of three days for it to get back home in the mail so my parents can drop it into the bank. At that point I would rather tell them to just put a double amount on my first real paycheck and forget about the "advance" shit if at all possible, since it's not really an "advance" if it's still gonna take them two weeks to sort it out anyway. I don't, however, think they can do that.

As for my weekend, it began this morning when I returned home from campus, even though that was the only class I taught all week. There's not a lot for me to do, to be honest with you; in the overnight hours tonight, I ran a load of laundry, and at some point this weekend I'll clean out the fridge so that I can take the garbage down to the road. My lesson-planning stuff is already done -- contingency plans put in place last week when those classes were canceled -- and my 102 class meets at the library on Tuesday morning anyway. The temperature isn't supposed to get above freezing until at least Wednesday, so none of this stuff is going to melt off until after that, at least. If the roads get better and/or clear off between now and then, it will simply be because people will have driven on them so much in the interim, because if they haven't plowed or treated them any more by this point, it's not like I expect them to from this point forward.

I will have to go out at some point this weekend for some food and other groceries, more than likely. I may wait until Monday if possible, just to let the roads clear up some more and for the temperature to crawl back up out of the single digits. The low tonight is supposed to be around zero.

In the meantime, though? I once more become a hermit for a few days.