(When I shared this essay, it had my writing group and I trying to catch our breath from laughing so hard, so I thought I'd share it.)
My father is a lovely man. He’s a lovely little man who, for many years drove a lovely little Ford Escort. My favorite story about Dad has to be the time he almost killed me while driving me home from college.
I lived exactly twenty minutes away from Edinboro University in Girard, PA. Girard is close to Erie. My Dad worked exactly thirty minutes away from Edinboro on the east side of Erie, and almost every weekend Dad would drive the escort to Edinboro to fetch my sister Emily and I. Neither of us had cars. Dad never complained. He’d always show up at our dorm rooms, a smile on his face and a joke on his lips. Then he’d help us carry our laundry baskets down to the car.
One more word about Dad, and then on to mortal danger. He’s a quiet guy. I modeled my sense of humor partially on him. You wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd and say, “I better not irritate him.” But there have been moments in my relationship with him when I’ve seen Dad become Captain Ahab in the face of harmless monsters. Maybe driving is one of the places where my Dad finds his self worth? Maybe he secretly wants to be challenged like a mountain man every now and again. Who knows? But you have to understand the stubborn streak in my Dad to fully appreciate the journey I’m about to take you on.
Cue the blizzard. It was the last day of our winter semester. The snow started at 1:00 pm and just dumped on us. Emily and I stayed in our dorm and hung out with our friends. We watched movies, packed our shampoo, and gave little thought to the snow mountains forming outside.
Dad was supposed to arrive at 5:30. My whole family is on time for everything. It was a big deal when he was a no show at 5:45. Nothing at 6:00. I started calling my mother at 6:30. None of us had cell phones then, so Dad was completely cut off from us. I was imagining terrible things at 7:00.
Finally, at 7:30 Dad appears in our dorm. I was relieved to see him and gave him a fierce hug. But the enormity of what he must have faced to get to us still didn’t register in my brain, or in Emily’s either, because we immediately started gathering our suitcases, pillows, and gigantic crates of books and loaded Dad up. It’s horrible that we treated Dad like a mule.
It was only as we were walking down the stairs on the third trip to the car that it occurred to me to say, “Hey, Dad, if it’s really bad outside maybe we should just sleep over here tonight? The school will let us.”
Dad didn’t even think about this suggestion. “Nah. I want to get home.”
Now I have to stop and explain the depths of the trust I had for my Dad. He was never sick, always drove everywhere, worked long hours, was almost always in a good mood. This was a man I believed in. When he said, “I want to get home,” what I heard was, “I can get us home safely. Don’t worry.”
Well!
I snuggled into the backseat of the car. Seven bags were stuffed into our trunk and crowding into the backseat with me. “Turn up the heat, Dad,” I said and closed my eyes.
Dad started the car, backed up and ran over a snow mound. Nothing serious, but this bump set off the secret passenger in our trunk.
Unbeknownst to me, Emily had packed one of her stuffed animals. Emily loved all things that had to do with horses, and this particular horse made a neighing sound when you shook it.
So what happened was: bump…neigh…neigh…neiiiiiigh.
I sighed. I knew it wasn’t any use complaining. I would just have to try and sleep through this annoyance.
And sleep I did. For twenty minutes. The time it usually took us to get home to Girard.
When I woke up, everything was dark. I couldn’t see the roads. I couldn’t see the street lights. I could only see my sister in the front seat because her face was illuminated by the green dashboard lights.
“Where are we?” I asked.
No one answered me.
I said a little louder, “What time is it?”
Emily was hunched forward in her seat. She muttered, “It’s eight.”
Eight! I thought, Why aren’t we home? I asked again, “Where are we?”
Emily grumbled, “We’re on a back road.”
I looked out my window and couldn’t see anything except for the black outline of trees. “Why are we on a back road?”
“Because they’ve closed down the main roads,” she said with bitterness.
“What!” The first stab of fear shot through me. Erie never closed anything for snow. No suburb around Erie ever closed down anything for snow. This blizzard had to be the Krakatao of snowstorms. And here we were, smack in the middle of it, with nothing to protect us except my Dad’s strength of personality and the dubious qualities of a $10,000 car.
“It’s okay,” my Dad said in his quiet, good-humored voice. “I know what I’m doing.”
“But…?”, I fumbled for the right logic. “If they closed the main roads, doesn’t that mean that these roads will be twice as bad?”
Emily now said in a loud voice, “I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“That’s enough, Emily,” Dad said. Obviously, he and Emily had been arguing about this the whole time I was asleep.
I was completely awake now, and all I could think about was the snow. Snow creeping up a foot at a time, blocking roads, hiding ice patches, and keeping us from ever getting home.
The escort hit a bump and off went the stuffed animal, neigh…neigh…neiiiigh.
The next half an hour passed in tense silence, except for the occasional horse noise. I knew Emily was mad because Dad wasn’t listening to her. Dad was trying to see a road that simply didn’t exist any longer.
And I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my Dad had driven me into what amounted to be a very bad survivalist movie. As an English major, I couldn’t allow a situation to be just bad. I had to embellish it. So in my head I was thinking, all we need to do is clip an axe murderer in the dark with our car and then we’ll really be doomed.
But we didn’t need an axe murderer to be doomed. We only needed a hill.
All these years later, I can’t understand why Dad took us home the way he did. He had to remember that the hill was there. I could ask him again today, but he wouldn’t really tell me. He’d probably just say with a laugh, “It was the only way home.”
I always hated that hill, even before the blizzard. At the top was a cow-hide tanning facility. At the bottom of the hill, in the summer, the smell of rotting flesh filled your car and made your eyes water. I used to try to hold my breath until we got over the hill. But I always ended up gasping three-quarters of the way up and getting a big mouth full of dead cow air.
Even with such low visibility, I could see the twist in the road that was leading us up that hill. My breath rushed out, and I whispered, “Oh Dad, we’re never going to make it.”
“Shhhh,” was all he said.
I swallowed my fears the best I could. I wanted to see everything at once, as if me seeing would somehow help my Dad steer the car.
Up we crawled, an escort with no snow tires. Us against a forty-degree angle. The hill curved and bucked its way to the top.
The stuffed animal went off. Neigh…neigh…neiiiighhh.
“Emily, I hate that horse,” I said.
“Don’t make fun of that horse. It was a present.”
I muttered, “I hate it.”
“Stop it, you two.” Dad’s tone was a bit abrasive. His good humor was deflating.
Then, half way up, the escort lost its fight with the snow.
Again and again, Dad tried to back up and speed forward. No dice. We were stuck.
Emily said, “I told you so.”
Dad ignored her.
We sat. We all stared. Ten terrible movies went through my head. Most of these movies involved my Dad, Emily, and myself struggling through waist deep snow to reach an abandoned leather factory where we would freeze to death in a rust colored barn.
“There won’t be any cars coming by,” I whispered. “This is a back road.”
I wondered about blankets. We would need blankets. Then I laughed a little hysterically, “Hey, at least Emily and I have all our bed stuff!”
I reasoned with myself that if we ran out of gas and the car dipped below freezing, we could all huddle together, buried beneath four blankets and a heap of dirty laundry.
“There’s a car,” my sister said in a monotone voice.
We all watched as the station wagon crested our patch of hill, blinded us with its high beams, and then kept chugging along right past us.
“He doesn’t want to get stuck either,” my Dad said softly.
Was my Dad feeling guilty for leading his only daughters into the mouth of a cold hell? Could I be a hero if my sister started freezing and needed me to sprint down the hill for help? Why hadn’t I put those pop tarts into my bookbag before I left?
These were the thoughts that crowded in my head when a truck with a snowplow magically drove up next to us. The man plowed us out. He didn’t say much. We were all too cold to have conversations when we opened our doors to yell help. When we were free, the truck drove up the hill and out of sight.
I didn’t say this out loud, but I thought, what if we get stuck again?
Somehow, over the course of the next twenty minutes, the escort slipped and slid and pulled itself up that terrible hill.
I let out a breath and a smile crept over my face. I thought we were safe.
But after the hill was a field.
In normal weather, there was a road next to this field. In blizzard weather, there was only a vast, flat, two-foot-deep square of snow, and we were about to drive straight through it.
I couldn’t see anything. “Dad, where’s the road?”
Dad couldn’t see the road.
Emily said, “We shouldn’t go this way.”
“There’s no other way to go,” snapped my Dad.
My chest had never felt so tight from stress before.
“Open your door, Emily,” my Dad said.
“What?”, she barked.
For one crazy second, I thought Dad was going to boot Emily out of the car.
“Open your car door,” he repeated, “Look for the road.”
And so she did. My Dad did the same, and then he drove right into a ditch.
Neigh…Neigh…Neiiiighhhhh.
“Damn it!” my Dad said.
So there we were. Stuck again. Doors open, cold air rushing in. My Dad starts to back up.
“Dad, don’t,” Emily said.
He drove forward a foot, then backed up again.
“Dad, stop,” Emily repeated.
This time I could see why she was yelling. Her car door was acting like a plow in the two-foot-high snowdrifts. When he backed up, whole buckets full of snow were falling onto her legs.
Forward he went. Then back again. He was completely silent. I think he was in a private war with that blizzard.
Both of us cried out this time. “Snow! Dad! Stop!”
“Emily,” Dad roared, “Stop yelling!”
Neigh…neigh…neiiiiiiigggghhhh.
The last forward momentum of the car got us out of the ditch. Dad slammed his door shut. Emily struggled with hers.
“Shut the door, Emily.” Dad shouted.
“I’m trying!” Emily shouted back.
I gritted my teeth and prayed.
The minutes passed. The car kept moving forward. Fifteen minutes later, the tension in our little car seeped back down to just barely hostile.
Then my Dad looked over at Emily and asked in a tone laden with surprise. “Emily, you’re feet are covered in snow?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice exhausted.
“How did snow get in the car?” he asked incredulously.
“YOU PLOWED IT INTO THE CAR!” she bellowed.
Dad went silent. Emily crossed her arms and stared out her window.
To this day, Dad still doesn’t really understand how that snow got in the car. Even now Emily gets annoyed at Dad when she tries to explain what happened. He simply tells her, “I was just trying to get you home.” He doesn’t see the horrors in that night like we do.
And I have to give Emily credit. She knew we shouldn’t have been on those back roads about thirty seconds after Dad turned on to the first one, and she didn't once pander to my Dad’s mountain man adventure dreams.
But I’m the real winner in this whole story. Neither my Dad or sister care that I was in the car that night. I didn’t annoy either of them. Their battle rages only between the two of them. I am free to relive the humor.
After I got home that night, I got to tuck that experience away for all the summer days I would ever spend with a new friend. I love to tell this story so much that I pounce on new people. I rub my hands together and say to my new friend, “Let me tell you about the time when my Dad battled a blizzard.”
by
Melody Platz
