For the moment, anyhow. I'll get to that in a bit.
Yesterday morning, after getting up around 11, I realized that I was dismally low on cigarettes. Mind you, this was a mere sixteen hours or so after the snow had stopped, if that, which meant that everything was still coated in a white nightmare. I decided that I wasn't that cold, and proceeded to put on three shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of thick, thermal boot socks, my wool peacoat, hat, scarf, two pairs of gloves, annnnnnd....to top it all off...my six-pounds-each steel-toed Caterpillar boots. I decked myself out for battle. It was time...to shovel the driveway.
*dramatic music*
Ahem. Anyway.
Even though it wasn't necessary for me to shovel the driveway to walk a mile or so to the gas station to get some cigarettes, I knew that I needed to do it anyhow -- the rest of my weekend would still be spent inside reading and studying for comps and doing little else, so it would have to be done anyhow at some point if I wanted to be able to get out of the house to go teach next week -- and I didn't want to wait to do it until after it had thawed a little in the sun and re-froze into solid ice last night, as that would've made it much harder to do then.
Before I started shoveling, I went down to the garage and replenished my car with its vital fluids -- I gave her a new quart of 5w30 oil, refilled her antifreeze (she was pretty low, and hadn't given me the "low coolant" light yet, which was interesting), and put some Marvel Mystery Oil in with the quart of oil to clean some of the gunk out of her engine. Little preventative-maintenance things like that keep my car running strong. I wasn't planning to drive her anywhere until this stuff melted or was plowed off, so I figured it was better to do it now, in the garage, where it wasn't below freezing constantly.
Once I finished, I dusted off and de-cobwebbed the snow shovel (which should tell you how long it's been since I've actually needed to use it) and began shoveling the driveway. The snow was a lot lighter than I expected it to be -- very fluffy and powdery, not dense and wet -- so for the most part it was easy to move it. I had just started shoveling when I heard a loud roaring noise and looked up -- the neighbor on the farm next door had once more taken out his tractor and had decided to plow out our street. Awesome, I thought. What a class-act of a guy right there. I had maybe shoveled about half of the driveway, maybe a little more than a third, by the time he had almost effortlessly finished plowing my street -- and then he pulled the tractor into my driveway.
He looked at me, and nodded. I waved at him warmly. And he put down the shovel on his tractor, and in three smooth passes had scraped the vast majority of the snow on my driveway off to the side and into the gutters and ditches. I was...well, stunned. He'd done this once before, years ago -- back when my longtime ex was still living here -- but I wasn't really expecting it this time. I made many "thank you" motions with my hands, and he smiled and pulled back out to finish plowing the end of the street.
Apparently, the snow-plow fairy does exist.
Over the course of the next few days, I'm going to write him a very nice thank-you letter and stick it in his mailbox at the end of the street. Words can't really express how much I appreciated his help.
So, I was left standing in my now mostly-cleared driveway, looking at my now somewhat-cleared street. Hm, I thought. I have a car that's just been replenished with fluids, and I've driven on worse snow than this...
I cleaned off the rest of the driveway in the spots where it needed to be cleared, and was about to put my shovel away when my other neighbor came out to clean off the area around his car. Said neighbor works at Walmart -- all of his family does, actually; he, his wife, and his son.
"You guys been to work since all of this hit?" I asked.
His car is older than mine by several years, but it's in better condition for the most part -- it's a big Buick Park Avenue, and those things will run forever.
"Yeah, [wife] is there right now, and I worked last night," he replied.
"What are the roads like between here and there?"
"Shitty," he said. "Main roads are pretty much fine, but all of the side streets haven't had anything done to them at all. They're a mess. You have to go out?"
"Eh, it's either now or later," I said. "Neighbor saw me shoveling and plowed out the rest of the driveway for me, so now's as good a time as any."
"I'm going to try to move my car into the garage; maybe he'll plow out our side too. But yeah, you should be okay with that big car of yours. It looks worse than it is."
This was not true at all.
I got into the Monte Carlo and gingerly backed her out of the drive. This was fine. She was running strong, warm, from being in the garage. Before I'd backed out, my helpful snow-plow-fairy had taken the tractor up the street to see what else he could plow, so I had a clear shot off my street. I breathed deeply and eased the car into motion.
There's something people don't tell you about driving in snow when your car is a landboat and has a low center of gravity -- you can drive straight just fine, but when you get to a corner and have to turn? Have fun, because that's not pleasant at all.
The streets surrounding my house hadn't been treated or plowed at all -- these are residential neighborhoods, and plows and road crews don't do them. However, they had been driven on quite a bit, so they were passable, but barely. Turning was a nightmare. The Monte Carlo almost went into a ditch or snowbank several times. I learned that you need to use momentum when driving in snow; don't stop if you can possibly avoid it, or you'll probably get stuck or otherwise unable to correct your steering no matter how hard you try. I got to 14th Street -- one of Newton's most heavily-traveled roads aside from Main -- and it was godawful. It also took me about ten minutes to get there.
My driving skills are strong, even in snow -- I know where my car is and what it can and will do. I know its strengths and weaknesses. I know its size and turning radius. These skills are the only things that saved me from going into the ditch or a snowbank. I can anticipate traction and response times from the gas pedal to the wheels, or from the brake to the wheels. So, by the time I got up to the end of 14th Street, where the gas station is, I knew I could safely make it to Walmart. I turned onto Main only to find....clear streets. Just wet. Plows had taken care of everything there. Getting to Walmart was not a problem.
While the parking lot was a mess, I got inside and did what I like to call "essentials shopping." This means, really, that I got cat food, cigarettes, and a few other small things I needed around the house that I could eat without really needing to cook a whole lot, but would be enough to make me figuratively limp through the next week or so without worries about running out of things. I got back in the car and came home -- very slowly and carefully, again, slip-sliding here and there. When I pulled into my driveway, I parked the car and swore that I wouldn't go out again until everything was much clearer and easier to traverse -- while I could get to Walmart and back, it wasn't without a lot of difficulty, and there's no way I could get to campus and back without possibly wrecking my mighty Monte Carlo. She didn't like the snow that much, and I don't blame her -- there's just too much of it. If we'd gotten half of what we did, it would still be too much. I can drive her normally in 4-5" or so, but anything more than that is a nightmare.
In the interim, this is what it looks like outside now:
Once I got home, I was able to do some somewhat productive stuff around the house -- I baked some rolls with the remainder of dough Daisy's mom made us for pizza crust last weekend, I did all of the laundry and dishes, and I spent a long time talking to Daisy herself before bed.
However, we're not out of the woods yet.
I awoke to this alert this morning:
... WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY EVENING THROUGH LATE MONDAY NIGHT...
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN WICHITA HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM SUNDAY EVENING THROUGH LATE MONDAY NIGHT.
* TIMING... SNOWFALL WILL BEGIN SUNDAY EVENING AND PERSIST UNTIL MONDAY NIGHT. THE PERIOD OF THE HEAVIEST SNOW WILL BE VERY EARLY MONDAY MORNING THROUGH MONDAY AFTERNOON.
* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... THE HEAVIEST ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 12 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE MAINLY NORTH AND WEST OF THE KANSAS TURNPIKE THROUGH CENTRAL AND SOUTH CENTRAL KANSAS. 3 TO 6 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE SOUTH OF THE TURNPIKE.
You're kidding me, right?
The turnpike, for those of you unaware, is just south of the city of Wichita. To get to it, you drive south on I-135 until you're basically past the city, then hop on it. This means that here in Newton and all of Wichita will get the worst of this new storm when it begins to roll through tomorrow night. Sonofabitch I hate winter!
When I read that, I was very glad that I'd gone out yesterday to get what I needed. While I don't go to campus on Monday, I normally do have to go in on Tuesday -- as you probably know, it's the longest day of my week and the day where I have all of my office hours, writing center hour, I teach, and now I have my visiting writer meetings on Tuesday afternoons.
My friends and I are thinking of starting a betting pool on whether or not the university will close down again. With the snow and ice already on the ground and the roads, it's not going to take much to completely fuck travel and commutes again in and around the city -- especially if the snow is really heavy for most of Monday. It also means that even if the university doesn't close, based on how bad the roads are up here in Newton already, that I know I won't be able to make it to campus on Tuesday if this storm hits as strongly as they say it will. I sent an email to my students telling them that, for now, to hold steady -- we don't yet know what's going to happen, but as of right now assume that this week's classes will go on as scheduled. That's all I can do, really, until I see what the weather is like on Monday during the day.
* IMPACTS... THE STRONG WINDS COMBINED WITH MODERATE TO HEAVY SNOW WILL CAUSE ROADS TO BE SNOWPACKED WITH BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW AND WILL REDUCE VISIBILITIES. AT TIMES VISIBILITIES COULD BE REDUCED TO A QUARTER MILE. THIS WILL CAUSE TRAVEL TO BE DANGEROUS... AND IS DISCOURAGED.
Yep. I swear, it feels like I'm living on top of the mountain in West Virginia all over again. It is not a welcome feeling.
"The heavens are giving you time to study," Daisy told me this morning. "Cherish it."
She's right; the rest of my weekend (however long that "weekend" may end up being when it's all said and done) will be spent poring over Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, and probably some John Keats if I have the time. I have ordered several more books from Amazon -- a Sharon Olds collection, a C.K. Williams collection, and a few others -- to focus on for the rest of the month, but with this storm those shipments may be delayed just like the other ones have been as of late (of four Amazon orders I've made in the past week or so, I've only received one as of yet -- the sport coat, which doesn't fit that well). It'll be a bit of relaxation time, to be sure, but all of the shitty weather is seriously messing with my teaching schedule and my ability to give my students the time they need for their second and third units of my class.
I'll have to wait to see what happens, I suppose. But until then, I'm taking Daisy's advice -- I'm curling up downstairs with a book and the electric blanket as much as I can, and when I'm not doing that, I'm burying my nose in PDFs of authors on my reading list.
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