The first snowflakes were falling when I arrived at my friend Amy’s house in Warner, N.H., around 3 p.m. on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
We were meeting friends later that evening, and as the snow picked up, we discussed whether we should depart earlier than planned in order to avoid the peak of the storm. “That’s a good idea,” I said. Amy contacted Jenny, and offered to pick her up on our way, and we shot an e-mail to Laurie and Beka in Vermont, telling them we’d be at the Salt Hill Pub at 5:30 rather than 6:30. “Be careful,” Amy’s husband said, as we dusted off our cars.
“Sure,” we said, and set out.
The 40-mile stretch of Interstate 89 between Warner and our rendezvous in Lebanon, N.H., is particularly desolate, a dark and windy stretch of highway that is prone to snow and freezing rain. There were a lot of cars on the road, and I inched cautiously along, gritting my teeth and cursing
the weather. At one point, the traffic came to a near-halt, as cars in the right lane were forced to merge with the left lane due to an accident.
When my cell phone rang, I was driving so slowly — about two miles an hour — that answering didn’t seem at all dangerous, and I picked up. It was Beka, wanting to know what was going on.
“We’re on our way,” I said. “Is the weather bad?” Beka asked. “Well, it’s certainly not good,” I said. “But it could be worse.” “OK,” Beka said. “We’ll meet you there.”
Actually, the weather was terrible, and I don’t know why I didn’t just admit it. After all, Beka is my best friend. I don’t get to see her very often because she lives in Seattle, and I would have been deeply disappointed if she had canceled, but shouldn’t my main concern have been her welfare? At that point, it was too late to save myself — I’d gone too far to turn around. And Amy and Jenny were out there, too — I couldn’t just bail on them. But Beka — I could have spared her this madness.
“Save yourself,” I could have said. “Stay home.” Instead, I said, “Great. See you later.”
When I lived in Alabama, every once in awhile I would wax nostalgic about snow, and one Christmas, while visiting my New Hampshire friends, I even went so far as to suggest that I missed it. “There’s something about the first snowstorm of the year,” I said. “It’s just so magical.” But Laurie, who now also lives in Seattle, was having none of this. “I don’t miss snow at all,” she said. “Snow sucks.”
Well, at the time that seemed awfully harsh. But I’ve come to see that Laurie is right. Snow does suck. I discovered this when I returned to the Northeast. Shoveling, I discovered, is not a whole lot of fun. Nor is being cold. But the least fun thing about snow is driving in it. I absolutely hate driving in snow. It’s dangerous, and it makes me nervous, and if I can, I avoid it.
But there’s something about growing up in a place like New Hampshire — or any place that gets a lot of snow — that makes you reluctant to cancel plans because of the weather, because if you cancel your plans every time the weather is less than ideal, well, you’ll basically spend the bulk of November through March hunkered down at home, never doing anything. Not to mention the fact that people who cancel their plans because of weather are total wimps. Right? I mean, isn’t this how people from snowy places think?
I know it’s how I think, and I know I’m not alone.
Of course, this type of thinking explains how otherwise reasonable people might find themselves on I-89 during a snowstorm, contemplating their own mortality.
What’s weird is that when I was growing up I didn’t view driving in snow as a very big deal. I knew it was risky, but it was also sort of an adventure. I remember going out on snow days to hang out with friends. I remember the time my car broke down on I-89 during a snow storm, and my friend and I gamely started walking down the interstate, only to be stopped by a kindly police officer who set up flares around the vehicle. I remember sliding off the road with my father while driving back from
basketball practice. Why, I asked my friends when I finally made it to the Salt Hill Pub, did driving in snow now seem like such a big deal? Why did I dread it so much?
My friends weren’t sure, but they, too, have come to hate driving in snow. Maybe living in warmer climates spoiled us. Maybe we’re just concerned about our cars. But the real issue, I think, is that snow messes everything up. The Salt Hill Pub gathering had been in the works for months. You had people from Seattle, Albany, Warner and Boston converging on this one spot, and coordinating a rain date would have been impossible.
And so it never occurred to us to cancel. Off we went.
It was crazy, yes. But I wouldn’t say it wasn’t worth it. “I love that months and years can go by without seeing friends, but when you get together in person you can just pick up with conversation and it’s like you see each other regularly,” one of my friends wrote in an e-mail that I received when I was back at work.
Which made me think that the really crazy thing to do would have been to stay home.
Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in the Saturday Lifestyles section of the Gazette.
