Announcement
I am happy
to announce that this is my 200th post on albertnet! My first post was in February of 2009, over four years ago.
My 100th post was in March, 2011. Odd … it doesn’t
feel like I’ve been at it that long.
Introduction
You may
wonder what I mean by “The Spawning.”
Well, that’s just an extra phrase I like to add when giving the name of
any sequel, because it just says “cheap retread.” I got this phrase from “Piranha II – The Spawning,” which was James Cameron’s first full-length film, and a bad one—one reviewer
called it a “near-total disaster” and “almost impossibly bad.” Oddly enough, “Piranha
II” wasn’t actually a sequel to “Piranha.” Its original title was “Flying Killers” and I
guess making it look like a sequel was an attempt to cash in on the earlier (also
terrible) movie.
This post
isn’t exactly a sequel, either, though it has much in common with an earlier archival
post, “Trouble with Tire Chains.” What follows is another snow-packed
tale of road trip woe, this one even more harrowing than the original. I think the phrases “near-total disaster” and
“almost impossibly bad” work pretty well in describing it. (Of course it could have been worse, like if
somebody had been injured, but then I wouldn’t be blogging so lightly about it.)
It started as a vacation
My family
decided to spend the kids’ spring break in Colorado, where we have friends and
family. Five years ago we did this same trip
and encountered a freak snowstorm on Vail Pass, where our 1984 Volvo had just enough traction to keep moving.
On the way home from that trip, we took I-80 through Wyoming to avoid
Vail Pass, only to hit an icy section and slide right off the highway, as had
more than a hundred other cars on that stretch that day (click here and search on “April 11, 2008” for details).
We figured the weather should be better this year; I mean, what are the
odds we’d get such strange weather a second time?
Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. This time the storm was far, far worse. The weather in Nevada and Utah had been fine,
but the closer to Vail Pass we got, heading east on I-70, the worse the reports
were. Vail Pass was eventually closed
due to ice and multiple accidents. A
parking lot was set up to accommodate stranded motorists, but it was full by
the time we got there. We could have
stayed the night somewhere to wait out the storm, but the weather forecast for
the area was “endless snow for the rest of our miserable, frigid lives with
absolutely no sign of respite.” (I’m
paraphrasing.) I didn’t fancy living out
the rest of my days in a little town like Eagle or Edwards (slogan: “Home of the Kobe Bryant sex scandal!”).
So: onward.
Electronic signs advised us to use “alternate routes,” of which there
was only one: taking Highway 24 south to
Leadville, and coming back northeast on Highway 91, about a 45-mile
detour. We guessed that this is what the
signs were suggesting (the lack of specificity perhaps being for liability
reasons). The gal at the Colorado Visitors
Center in Eagle checked the conditions on these highways and said they should
be okay.
Detour around Vail Pass
Much signage
warned that commercial vehicles—i.e., semis—were not allowed on Highway 24, but
that didn’t stop one trucker from trying, and jackknifing his vehicle in the
process. An indescribably masculine tow
truck was hooking up to it when we came by.
I immediately thought of a Radiohead song: “In the next world war/ In a jackknifed
juggernaut/ … An airbag saved my life.”
Traction
wasn’t bad on these twisty little highways.
Our car, a 2006 Volvo V70 wagon with front-wheel drive, has good tires
on the front and new ones on the back, along with computerized Stability Traction
Control (STC) and a winter-driving mode that rides the clutch while you start
up from a stop. So I figured we’d be
okay, even though it was snowing increasingly hard and it was becoming difficult to keep ice off the windshield.
From bad to worse
When we got
back on I-70 eastbound there wasn’t much traffic—only those cars that had taken
the detour like us—but a number of drivers were going way, way too fast. I’m not some craven poltroon when it comes to
snow driving—I learned the craft as a teenager in Boulder, without the
inhibition of a fully formed prefrontal cortex—but I have respect for icy conditions and the high stakes of highway
driving. (After being a passenger in a
high-speed rollover back in 1984, I learned to appreciate that these kicky, fun
vehicles—the heartbeat of America—can also be accurately described as killing
machines.) I crept along at about 30 mph
while guys in 4WD pickup trucks sailed by at 50 or 60, with complete faith that
4WD means nothing bad can happen. This
blithe belief in pure fiction reminded me of something … but what? Finally it hit me: in their carefree ignorance these motorists
are just like the teenage girls who believe they can’t get pregnant the first
time they have sex. Sure enough, we did
see a few vehicles off the side (all of them 4WD, I hasten to add).
Everything
was fine (other than increasingly poor visibility) until we hit a long uphill and the strangest thing happened. The car just started to slow down, regardless
of what I did with the gas pedal. Moreover, the Stability Traction Control (STC)
light on the dashboard, which lights up when this feature kicks in, went from
an occasional flicker to being on practically all the time. According to an online Volvo forum, when STC
detects slippage it “retards the timing to keep the revs at an acceptable level
to prevent slip.” The problem was, there
was so little traction, the transmission was putting power to the wheels less
and less of the time. After making sure
nobody was behind me, I tried the left lane to see if it was less slick. It wasn’t.
Eventually, to my utter horror, the car simply came to a stop!
I had
thought that making it through this ordeal would depend mainly on my skill as a
driver. So long as I kept the speed
down, used engine compression (not the brakes) to decelerate, and kept a cool
head, I figured, everything would be fine.
But it turns out the enterprise was doomed from the outset. A car this heavy, with these tires, on a road
surface this slippery, could not possibly make it over a grade this steep, no
matter who was driving. It was all a
matter of physics, with no room for negotiation.
Completely screwed!
In
accordance with a corollary of Murphy’s Law, my car had come to a stop not far
after a blind curve. I immediately checked
behind us—still nobody coming—and attempted to back up and steer right, to get the
car onto the shoulder. Actually, there
wasn’t much of a shoulder, which is one of the reasons I hadn’t attempted to
install my tire chains: the chances of
being run over by an overconfident driver had, up until now, seemed higher than
the likelihood of chains being necessary.
Have you
ever watched a propeller plane stunt pilot do a hammerhead stall? The plane flies straight up until it
stalls (or seems to stall), and then the nose comes around (whether due to
pilot input or some by-product of the physics of the aircraft) and the pilot
flies straight down until he gets enough speed to regain control. Well, for some reason, as I rolled backward,
my car attempted a hammerhead stall of its own.
There was absolutely nothing I could do to keep the front end from
swinging around. This is how I found
myself pointing the wrong direction on I-70!
It was all I could do to steer into the snow bank beside
the left lane. I ended up stuck there, facing
the oncoming traffic!
Keeping an
eye on the road and honking my horn whenever a car approached, I dialed 911
from my cell phone. When the dispatcher
gathered that my car wasn’t damaged and there weren’t injuries, she transferred
me to a DOT call center. The person
there said she’d try to get a tow truck out to me. This of course seemed highly unlikely: the only way to get to where I was, to my
knowledge, was via that 45-mile detour near Leadville. The cars I’d seen off the road looked to have
been long abandoned. My options seemed
limited to sitting in my car and waiting for help, or installing my chains in
the middle of the interstate just past a blind curve. (My wife thought of a third plan—she offered to
try pushing the car out—but I refused: too
dangerous, plus it wouldn’t address the greater problem, which was our ongoing lack
of traction. I could see my hammerhead
stall scenario simply repeating.)
Tire chains and the law
Before too
long a DOT truck pulled up. The DOT guy
parked in my lane about fifty feet back with his big yellow warning lights on,
and came over to assess my situation. He
said a snowplow was on its way, that was spitting sand out the back. Sure enough, it showed up, and stopped just
ahead of my car (i.e., uphill from us).
The DOT guy pulled out a shovel and started taking loads of sand from
the back of the snowplow truck and shoveling it under my tires. He was oddly cheerful, like this was all just
a grand adventure. As I walked to the
back of the car to get my tire chains, I realized the entire surface was
nothing but ice. Really: no bare asphalt, no sand, no mere packed
snow. My feet were slipping all over the
place. The road was all ice, the whole
damn thing. With the right power tools
we could have made enough Slurpees for everyone in Colorado.
A cop showed
up. He eyed my tires and said, “Those
don’t look like very good snow tires.
You should think about getting something better. Continental makes some nice ones.” I replied, “Well, I’m from California.” (Driving in snow as seldom as I do, I’m not
about to buy snow tires. Frankly, if I’d
had any inkling the roads would be this bad, I’d have simply canceled the
trip.)
I do wish,
now, that I had some photos of all this.
A picture in this case would be worth about five hundred regular words
and five hundred profanities, many of them from you. But of course getting out the camera would
have been ridiculous. In the midst of a
crisis, snapping photos is in very poor taste … just ask Lynndie England.
The cop
asked what the plan was. The DOT guy
said, “I’m going to finish sanding behind his tires and then push him out, and
then he can follow the snowplow the rest of the way.” The cop told him, “Don’t try to push him out. It’s too dangerous. He could crush you with his car.” I told the cop, “I was thinking of putting on
my tire chains, now that the traffic is blocked behind me.” I had the chains out now and was untangling
them in preparation.
If you read
my other tire chain post, you know how much I despise chains, but most of that is ideological: whenever I’ve had to use them, it was because
the DOT pointlessly mandated it, when the conditions were actually fine. Sure, chains are a drag to install,
especially when it’s only 20 degrees out and your hat and gloves are buried in
your luggage, but when your car has become a two-ton paperweight stranded on the
highway, you suck it up. Or at least I
do.
But the cop replied,
“Don’t put on your chains. They’re not
going to help, not here. Actually, I
don’t think chains really belong on cars.
They work for semis and that’s about it.” Surprised as I was to hear this, I wasn’t
going to argue. For one thing, I try
never to argue with cops, and for another, his confidence in me, a California
driver with three-season Yokohama tires, was infectious, especially when I had a
sand-spewing snowplow to lead me.
The only
problem was, the cop continued to argue with the DOT guy about the
pushing-me-out strategy. It got pretty
heated. Eventually the DOT guy said,
“Hey, man, I’m just here to get a paycheck!”
Incongruous as this was, the cop either acquiesced, decided at this
moment debate was pointless, or got sick of my ordeal—who knows which—and got
back into his car. Following this the DOT
guy successfully pushed me out, the snowplow got rolling again, and as the DOT
guy yelled “GO! GO! GO!” my car magically gripped the sand-enhanced
road and we set off. I don’t think we
broke 10 mph, but I wasn’t complaining.
This went on until the Eisenhower Tunnel, at which point the snowplow
pulled off and I was on my own.
Once more into the breach
While we
were stopped, my wife had scraped clean the windshield, so visibility was a lot
better for awhile, but I know we weren’t out of the woods yet. It was snowing harder than ever and the road
was still slicker than snot. Still, I figured
the closer we got to civilization and the car-worn roads, the better off we’d
be, and I was actually starting to feel more optimistic when we made it past
Georgetown (elevation 8,530, a couple thousand feet lower than Vail Pass). Looking back, it seems impossible that this
is a distance of only thirteen miles.
Covering it seemed to take forever.
And then, on
an uphill that came out of nowhere, I felt that dreaded sensation of the car
losing more and more speed.
When it
became obvious we were grinding to a halt, I acted on a desperate hunch that
the STC might be too conservative, cutting too much power to the wheels. So I turned it off. Whether due to the lack of STC or my having
taking a hand off the wheel, or both, I immediately lost control of the car and
we veered sharply to the right. By this
point we were out of momentum and traction anyway, and the car came to a
halt. Again, this was just past a blind
curve. What’s worse, traffic had picked
up, and it was dusk (a terrible time for visibility).
Prior to
this trip, I wasn’t sure whether or not my two daughters knew any swear words;
now I’m certain they do. As my wife
scrambled to find the DOT phone number I’d jotted down earlier, an old beater
car passed us and pulled over. I
abandoned the phone call (what would I have said anyway?) and got out to talk
to the car’s driver, a twenty- or thirty-something guy with the hip, sporty
look of a rock climber and/or espresso aficionado. He cautioned me that he’d seen a driver stuck
in this spot before and it had caused chaos, with cars and big rigs having to
change lanes very suddenly in the midst of the curve. “I can park behind you, before the curve,
with my hazards on,” he told me. “Do you
have chains? If you’ll take care of me,
I’ll put them on—I know how.”
I could have
installed the chains myself, with him merely stopping traffic behind me, but we
were quickly running out of daylight so it made sense to tag-team it. I must say I was happy to let somebody else
lie down in the road to get the inboard side of the chains hooked up. He had a snowsuit, at least.
Tire chains vindicated
The process
didn’t go too badly, considering. Sure,
my hands got so numb I couldn’t even tell I was cutting them up on frayed steel
cable strands, and it was hard to tell what we were doing in the dim light, and
our feet were slipping on the ice road, but we got ‘er done. We also troubleshot the windshield wipers,
which had become less and less effective since the tunnel. It turns out that so much ice had built up within
the mechanism at the base of the wiper arms, the blades weren’t even
contacting the windshield. I dug the ice
out of the passenger-side wiper while the Samaritan guy worked on the driver
side. Suddenly the wiper blade snapped
off in his hand. I held out some hope
that it was just the one-size-fits-all adapter that had come unsnapped, vs. an
actual breakage, and to my great relief this turned out to be the case.
I gave the
guy all the cash I had, which was $60, and he looked totally stoked. “That’s too much!” he protested. I insisted he take it. He offered to drive behind us until the top
of the hill just in case anything went wrong.
Unbelievably,
my car did manage to creep forward up the hill.
I couldn’t get much speed up—the STC light was still flashing
continually—but the chains were doing the trick. Alas, there was a very ominous thwack-thwack-thwack
sound from one of the chains, so I had to stop again.
The Samaritan stopped again and came to help. The loose end of the cable had come unclipped
but the chain was still intact. While he
and I fixed this, a DOT truck saw us and pulled over. It turned out to be the same guy who’d helped
me earlier. “You again?!” he said. I told him I was basically okay this time and
thanked him for stopping. As he made his
way back to his truck he said, “See you around!” I replied, “Hey, no offense, but I really
hope I never see you again!”
(By the way,
as regards that heading above about tire chains being vindicated: that applies only to ice-rink conditions such
as you’ll sometimes find in Colorado. I
still stand behind my previous excoriations of pointless tire chain mandates
for the occasionally cold, wet roads you’ll find in California.)
Final leg
With the
chains on and the wipers working, our progress was more predictable (though
still really slow). It got dark. The snow was blowing so hard, and my eyes were
so tired, I was stunned again and again by a deeply disturbing optical
illusion. Have you ever been in a car
wash, with your engine stopped and your parking brake on, and you suddenly
thought the car was rolling forward because the big mop-like brushes came at
you and shifted your frame of reference?
Something similar was going on here.
My windshield was once again icing up (despite my running the defroster
full time), so I was watching the taillights of the car a couple hundred feet
ahead of me, matching its speed exactly because the driver seemed to know what
he or she was doing. The combination of
my low speed, my lockstep progress behind this other car, and the absence of
any other visual cues indicating forward motion, along with the millions of
snowflakes blowing by (like the stars when the Millenium Falcon reaches
light-speed), gave the perception that my car was standing still. This of course was frightening given that
coming to an unplanned stop was my greatest concern.
Throughout
this drive, my kids were chattering away merrily in the back seat, evidently
completely oblivious of the danger we were in.
I guess I should be glad they have such complete faith in their parents,
as opposed to thinking we’re totally lame (though I know this will come soon
enough). At times, though, it was
oppressive trying to concentrate amidst all their giggling and (occasionally)
their fighting. And while I was wondering
if we’d even make it at all, my younger daughter kept asking, “How long until
we’re there?” I’m proud to say I
resisted the temptation to yell, “SHUT UP OR WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”
Just as we
reached Boulder, heading north on Highway 93, we saw a car that had gone off
the road, pointing north but in the ditch on the left. Either he’d been heading north and somehow
slid across four lanes, or he’d been heading southbound and did a 180. My wife phoned to report it as we continued
on our way. We were halfway across
Boulder when the Samaritan passed us again, tooting his horn. Finally we arrived at our friends’ house. The 400-mile drive had taken over twelve hours.
Epilogue
It snowed in
Boulder again the next day, and the day after that. It snowed again this past Monday, and yet again
yesterday, but I don’t care anymore because we did manage to make it home last
Friday without further incident. I spent
half of Sunday overhauling my poor bike, whose headset and bottom bracket
bearings were completely black when I repacked them.
Needless to
say, the whole time we were gone it was gloriously sunny and warm out here in
California. I think I’m done with spring
break in Boulder. Next year I think
we’ll just stay home and hang out. I can
rent some movies for the kids … maybe “Alive” or “Death Race 2000.” Hell, I might
even check out “Piranha II – The Spawning.”
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