Winter wonderland, my (cold) foot!

Since sometime last week, we’d been hearing about the forthcoming winter storm, due this past weekend.

Of course, living in Portland, there is no such thing as an uncapitalized winter storm. When you have generally mild (if damp) weather year-round, cold plus snow gives you, at a bare minimum, a Winter Storm. To hear the news folks tell of it, it yields more like a Winter Storm Death Blood-on-the-Ice Mayhem Catastrophe 2008 Snow-Zombie Apocalypse.

Now, I know you folks from more wintry climes are laughing at such hysteria, but deep down you’re jealous that we can freak out so easily about what is, to you, just normal winter weather. It just shows how nice it is here normally, so you “win” by having your weather be suckier. I happily concede.

Anyhow, by Saturday, things had gotten cold, but the forecast snow had yet to materialize. Not a surprise, of course — like I said, often the only thing blowing hard in winter is the weather talk. So when I woke up Sunday and peered out through the window condensation at the yard, only to see green grass*, I figured there was no reason not to drive to church.

However, while we were showering, dressing, and otherwise not looking, the snow suddenly launched a sneak attack. And how! Not merely coming down in the way where you have to look closely at a really dark tree for a few seconds — heck, not just coming down, but actually sticking and blanketing the streets in white!

Even in Portland, this isn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that I was considering driving in it. As little as we drive these days, my experience with driving in snow is pretty much near-zero — I may have driven once or twice while a few flakes were coming down, but without actually threatening to get between my tires and the road.

So I called our pastor, just to see what the story was out in Hillsboro (a suburb 15 miles or so to the west where our church is). As much as I enjoy our church, I was secretly hoping our pastor would say something like, “Are you crazy? Drive out here in this weather? Dear me, no!” Even though he doesn’t really talk like that — such is the power of winter weather. Or so I’d hoped.

Unfortunately, our pastor, like many Lutherans, spent quite a number of years out in die lutherische Mutterland, if you will, and as such had no apparent sympathy for a pair of native Texans looking fearfully at the falling snow. I believe his most comforting words were, “If it gets impassable or you start sliding, then turn around.” See, this is why I don’t talk to you people with experience in Midwest winters. If our car starts sliding, then owing to my Texas-bred inability to automotively deal with anything remotely slick, we will necessarily careen over a ledge and explode in a ball of flame — even if we are on a completely flat plain!

But the damage had been done. Namely, to my machismo. “It’s only snowing a bit — in fact, it had only started snowing recently, right? Snow itself isn’t so bad, right? It’s the ice that causes cars to crash and burn! I see no ice out there! We can do this with minimal automotive damage!” And so forth.

So it was that we ventured boldly out of the driveway. And, observing that we not only hadn’t died but hadn’t even hit any cars or trees, we kept on going. All the while muttering “I can do this” and “This is, of course, crazy” in equal measure.

Now, those of you who are familiar with Portland and its western suburbs know that to get from the former to the latter, one has to take Highway 26 over the West Hills, which entails a climb from near sea level to several hundred feet above sea level (the best estimate I could find was 400 feet). And while the West Hills are normally a pleasant spot, full of zoo animals, Japanese gardens, and the luridly well-to-do, in wintry times, they are also rather intimidating.

There’s nothing like snow to make you suddenly aware of your city’s topography. Not only does the snow become thicker (both in the air and on the ground) at higher altitudes, but that uphill drive you’ve done hundreds of times suddenly seems to be taking a much longer time than you remember.

Of course, in part, this was because we were driving a lot slower than normal, which I counted as a good thing. But then there was the general confusion of driving in the snow, which for me entailed following the relatively clear tracks made by previous cars. As opposed to any official notion of lanes, which had by apparent mutual agreement been abandoned by those on the highway. Every so often, I would catch a glimpse of the actual lane dividers in the tire tracks, though the two did not always run parallel.

Not that we had all lanes open to us. At the top of Sylvan Hill, there was more than one accident, with flares closing off the surrounding chunk of highway. In a way, I was thankful for those who had gone before, as they served as an suggestion to my fellow Portlanders to try and drive less foolishly — it has been noted that, in any wintry weather, it is Portland drivers’ stupidity that is the most dangerous element.

The view from west of Sylvan Hill, heading westbound; notice the very safe distance and speed!

And then, somehow, we arrived at church. Fifteen minutes late, but completely unscathed — even mentally. Who knew I was capable of such capable driving?

Indeed, on the journey back home from church, I was remarkably at ease. The human mind is a fantastically plastic machine, acclimating with incredible speed to different situations. Somehow, it seemed like I’d always been driving on white-covered roads, and adeptly, at that. “Ha ha!” I laughed at the dark gray clouds — not literally, as such, lest Julia think I was actually going snow-mad or whatever people do when it’s actually cold for long stretches of time.

Of course, scoffing at the weather is never a wise thing to do, even in mild Portland. So it was that, as we again neared Sylvan Hill, this time on the way home, we noticed the electronic highway sign that told us that chains were required in the Portland metro area.

Um. Well. That’s all well and good, of course, but we don’t actuall own any chains, you see. It’s sort of a matter of principle. If chains are required for driving, then I shouldn’t be driving in the first place! All very logical. Except for the part where I was somehow able to leave home without chains, only to be told I needed them to return.

At this point, we were left with several less-than-perfect options. We could exit the highway and hope to find a nearby store selling tire chains that happened to be open on Sunday while it was snowing enough to require chains. This one seemed pretty dubious from the start.

We could try to park somewhere that was both free and close to a public transit line, and come back at some later date once the snow had abated. However, given that the now-vindicated forecasters had called for up to a week of this weather, I wasn’t keen on the possibility of leaving my car in Beaverton for days on end.

This left, as best I could reason while still trying to drive safely, the option of driving back to Portland without chains and hoping for the best. Which presumably would involve minimal traffic tickets and/or death.

Rather than attempt again the relatively high altitude of Sylvan Hill that Highway 26 traverses, I decided to take the rather long way around, south on 217 and then back north on I-5. The only flaw in my plan was that, for whatever reason, I’d never actually driven this route in my life, and so I was unsure if, in fact, I’d be driving at lower — and therefore presumably less treacherous — altitudes. But my hunch seemed correct, and that’s as good as reality in these crazy postmodern times, right?

So yeah. We headed south, slowly, though safely. And then turned north onto I-5. Where we were again treated to electronic billboards alerting us to the need for chains, and possibly the certain death that awaited us if we ignored the part about the chains.

Okay, not really, but do you remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Roy Neary is driving closer and closer to Devil’s Tower, and the government has spread false reports of a nerve gas spill, so people are evacuating? And even though Roy thinks the spill is a fake, it seems very ominous as he continues on, passing dead animals and such? Well, we kind of felt like that. Nearly everyone had pulled over to the side of the road to put on chains. And there we were, passing them all while chainless. It certainly felt ominous.

And then, somehow, we made it back to downtown Portland, none the worse for wear, except for possibly a tense back on my part. I’d decided to avoid taking the Marquam or Ross Island bridges across the Willamette, since they both went a bit high for me to be comfortable driving on them in the cold and snow. Not that any bridge sounded like a good idea, but at least the Hawthorne could reasonably claim that it wasn’t at a higher altitude than any other surface street — any ice-inspired swerve and subsequent plunge off of it would be mercifully short.

Division Street, where bad drivers go to play

Interestingly, it was in this final stretch of our trip on the surface roads that we saw some of the worst driving. I was heading down Division, behind a pick-up truck whose driver would accelerate so fast after coming to a stop that it would fish-tail. And he either thought that was really fun or he was too stupid to learn from his mistake, because I watched him over-accelerate and then fish-tail six times. I found myself yelling at him, “Idiot! I’m a native Texan and I know how to drive better in this than you!” Not that he could hear me over the squealing of his tires.

Anyhow, we made it home, where I plan on keeping the car in the driveway until there is no sign whatsoever of anything remotely frozen** on the roads.

*See? Our grass was green in December! You “our winters are so bad that half my friends died of exposure last week” types probably had your grass die sometime in October! However, I will actually concede that, in losing (which is to say winning) the Crappy Weather war, you have actually won this battle, as I hate our lawn and wish it was dead pretty much year-round. I have little interest in mowing the lawn in between the frequent winter rains.

**Yes, that’s right, I only plan on driving on molten roads, you chemistry nerds!