The Mother Of All Blizzards

My Mom Went To Ohio And All I Got Was This Car Encrusted With Several Hundred Pounds Of Highway Salt

If it had been anyone else I would have said no, and steered the conversation to talk of hot chocolate and warm mittens. But it was my daughter. Pleading, "Mom, they canceled my bus. The dorm is closed for the break. The airports are shutting down and the train isn't running. I'm stranded at a bus depot in Indianapolis and I have no way to get home. What should I do?"

What should she do? Sit tight and pray, honey. Mom's driving out to get you. From Dayton, Ohio, it turns out, where she and a friend got a ride a few hours later, which was good because it made the interminable drive two hours shorter. That means my drive through the worst blizzard in the history of the state of Ohio timed out at something like "Eternity minus two."

As I recall my drive into the Heart of Darkness that was Ohio between Friday night March 7 and Saturday afternoon March 8, what I remember most is the suddenness with which my journey went from "Well, this isn't too bad. Where's that bag of salted peanuts I bought at the Quikchek? Darn, 1010 WINS is getting staticky" to "OH MY FREAKIN' GOD, IT'S LIGHTNING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKIN' WIND-WHIPPING SNOWBLIND TYPHOON."

There's a song from an old musical called "Wonderful Town" in which the sisters plaintively ask, "Why, oh, why, oh why-o, why did we ever leave Ohio." Quaint, I thought, but another Ohio song started pounding through my panicking brain, while I peered, stiffly, over the steering wheel, in first gear, at 1 mile an hour, searching vainly through the orbital sander that the snow had become, for an exit ramp: that other song was "Four dead in O-HI-O."

Finally, I was able to exit the terrifying hell of I-70 West just outside of Colombus. I took refuge in a large all night convenience store that was a trucker's paradise--coin operated showers and a huge, wall mounted wide screen tv tuned into the weather channel. There was a map that showed the area between Dayton and Columbus to be the hellish epicenter--the frozen ground zero--of what they were declaring "the absolute worst blizzard in the history of the state of Ohio! We're living through history, folks!" Oh, shut up.

By 1:30 pm saturday, I was able to extricate my humble Accord (four star crash test and road safety ratings from Consumer Reports, I reminded myself) and creep slowly down the frozen roadways and back on to I-70. At 5:48 pm I rolled, very slowly, into Dayton. As I retrieved my grateful daughter and we crept slowly down the exit ramp on to I-70 East we had a chance to see the scary aftermath of the blizzard: the long, long stretch of highway was littered with jackknifed tractor-trailors, fishtailed SUV's sticking up out of deep snow-filled ditches, and snow plows: yes, even the enormous mid-western snowplows had not been able to safely negotiate the enormity of this blinding, freezing, whipping, punishing blizzard.

But somehow--thanks, perhaps, to the guardian angels I had prayed to constantly when the full weight of it all hit--I had. Remind me to send Consumer Reports a thank you note.