From the Archives - The Fall of the House of Albert

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

I wrote recently that boredom is a problem for the brain to solve. The essay below was the fruit of a period of protracted boredom I suffered about fifteen years ago, during my college Christmas vacation. I’d gone to visit family and friends in my hometown, and after everybody else left to go back to school, I was alone for awhile—with no PC, not enough books, and nothing to do. Of course I didn’t have a cell phone yet, but more to the point there was nobody to call. I didn’t even have the family cat, Mulla, for company; he’d fallen down dead on Christmas Eve, right in front of the tree.

To occupy myself, I wrote what follows, by hand, with an actual pen and paper. (It’s nominally a letter to my brother Geoff, but of course it’s actually an essay; this was long before the blogosphere existed.) I’ve edited the essay just a bit here, mainly to give the albertnet reader some essential background information.

Fall of the House of Albert - January 9, 1991

Let me describe this day, this ninth day of the new year, a Wednesday, to you. Outside, stale grey. Not unusual. The temperature, a frustrating thirty- eight degrees. When I phone up the weather service I have to sit through the “Time & Temperature Advertising can work for your business! Call...” plug before getting the statistic. It’s frustrating because it’s too cold to ride comfortably, but not cold enough to give me a good excuse not to ride. Tell you the truth, my legs haven’t yet recovered from whatever I did to them: trying to pretend I could dance, I guess, but also some kind of overuse, or maybe it’s actually atrophy.

Truth is, I haven’t been all that motivated, to train or anything else. Remember the David Letterman cat poster, designed to present that cutesy animal theme coupled with a sobering dose of reality? A cat lying there with the caption, “Since they neutered me, I haven’t felt like doing much of anything. Life has lost all meaning; I wish I were dead.” Well, I haven’t been neutered and have no suicidal tendencies (not even an album) but I can relate to wanting to lie down all the time for lack of anything better to do. Today I’ve alternated between reading and sleeping.

I only have two books with me (and no library card, and no money for anything new). I’ve been reading Thurber, which is fine, but his essays are like snacks—great a few at a time, but nothing to binge on. I’ve also got a Nabokov book, but my brain is still too sore from finals to concentrate that hard. Actually, my brain’s probably just gone flabby. You know, da break, it a makes ya dumb, see. I jes set heah tinkin’, but none a dem brain waves an’ shit is movin’ up deah, ya know?

Plus, there’s nobody around. Friends and family have scattered. My dad is always either at work or at his lady friend’s house. I am the sole occupant of this house—which, when it was my childhood home, used to bustle with six loud people. Now it’s as silent and depressing as this grey day, this stale winter. It’s a stark physical embodiment of sheer nihilism. It’s an existential nothingness which can inspire nothing but a sudden split from big extra-credit words into the almost nostalgic “BLAH! JUST BLAH! ALL OVER THE PLACE SPACED-OUT BLAH! BLAH!” (Why “nostalgic”? About a decade ago our friend’s mom totally lost it over my her son’s chronic mental and physical disorganization and berated him with these words, right in front of us. Her strange outburst was immortalized—her words thrown on our pile of go-to utterances alongside quotes from “Breaking Away” and “Mad Max.”)

To catalog the blank slate (and empty chalk tray) of my environment, I will describe the dining room table I’m sitting at. A few pairs of scissors, I don’t know why. Piles of newspapers. There used to be a plastic basket for these in the corner, but after last trash pickup, it disappeared. And really, I can’t compel myself to care. This table is big enough for eight; that leaves plenty of room for shoving crap down to clear eating space for a maximum of two people. So the newspapers stay, along with a lot of other shit that is depressingly stationary, like this crappy stapler, mauve in color (who chose this and why?) with which, in an idle moment of fidgeting, I inadvertently punched a staple right through my thumb.

Nothing moves here. When I first arrived here for Christmas break, the house was strangely unoccupied. It turned out my brothers, to punish me for getting a ride from the airport from a friend instead of letting them pick me up, had vacated the place. I walked from room to room looking in vain for somebody; it felt like a ghost town. Now that feeling has returned, magnified by my newly acute perception.

Cat-food lids, two, and pennies, three; an undoubtedly dead Radio Shack D-Cell; a Realistic Weatheradio. All worthless, or worse. Cat-food lids: no more Mulla. Pennies: get these trinkets the hell out of here, they’re hardly reminiscent enough of money even to remind me how broke I am. The Weatheradio: useless in this drearily monotonous cold-and-grey. A foil-wrapped blob of some fruitcake or something everyone—I mean, my dad and I—are too lazy to eat or throw out. My dad even told me the other night, “Oh, here is some cake you could eat.” I could have said, “Dad, hello, where have you been? That’s weeks old, and nobody knows what it is or where it came from!”

But why shatter the tranquility? My dad’s mind is elsewhere, totally oblivious to this house and how it seems frozen in stone. A piece of coat-hanger has been on the floor, mere inches from the trash can, since I can remember. I could throw it away, but why? What difference does it make if it’s on the floor or in the can? Pop wouldn’t notice. I’d still see it in there a week from now. I could gather up these newspapers and put them in the corner, but they’d still hang around, like an odor. Besides, if I cleared off the table, think of the horror of that wide, empty expanse of wood, removing what little sign there is that this house is occupied at all. A huge cleaning operation of the entire abode would turn it into a magnified doll-house, except for all the weird crap I dare not move, because it could be involved in a supposedly active project. I’m talking about the Subaru manual, the drill, the Dremel tool, and other assorted tools on the funky white table adjacent to the dining table.

Wait, there’s something else on the funky table, unrelated to any project: an envelope labeled “Cartoons: Seen by J & boys 1990.” Who else is supposed to see it? Is some stranger going to wander in here and say to me, “Excuse me, but I see from the envelope label that I haven’t seen these cartoons yet. Mind if I peruse them awhile?” I really wonder about the label. Why give the year? Does Pop expect a natural disaster to bury this place in thirty feet of stone and ash, and he wants archaeologists digging it up centuries later to be spared the trouble of carbon-dating it all? (They might find the foil-wrapped mystery-cake, miraculously preserved and mere inches from the remains of my body, and create a touching tale of how I was about to take it to my grandma when suddenly buried alive.)

Maybe Pop wrote down the year because he realistically expects the envelope to sit there for years to come. The Albert Museum is taking form before our eyes! I have a vision of affixing a neat label to everything here: “Mauve stapler, 1990.” “D-Cell, 1989.” “Weatheradio, circa 1991.” The pennies lie about their chronological relation to the House of Albert. The newspapers, on the other hand, fix a moment of this house’s life—or indeed, its death—in history.

[In retrospect, it only appeared the house was dying. This was a transition period, when my dad’s attentions were elsewhere, and he was basically living at his lady friend’s house, so my childhood home—“2380” we always called it (and still do)—had become a mere staging area. This changed mightily and the house became a home again, to my brother Bryan’s family, a new generation of Alberts who surely still think of it as their childhood home.]

The really weird thing about all this stillness is that it isn’t entirely unnoticed by Dad. Almost, but not quite. The things I’ve described thus far will doubtless remain for eternity. Yet anything I leave around disrupts Pop’s sense of order. It’s as though any stapler or D-Cell or drill that has been stationary long enough has rightfully earned its place. Or maybe it becomes invisible; it eludes my dad’s perception in the same manner as the rotation of the earth. Continuity creates the illusion of motionlessness.

So powerful is Pop’s perception of foreign objects in his domain that he will even request, on occasion, that these objects be removed. The other day, or maybe several centuries ago, he asked me to remove my Christmas presents from the far corner of the living room where they were tucked away in the intersection of fireplace and piano.

Never mind that in the big scheme of things, those presents are the most transient objects in the whole house. Imagine a time-lapse movie of this house—you know, like the ones National Geographic makes by filming a glacier for ten years and then playing back the footage at high speed so that the whole decade can be watched in 30 seconds and we can see a glacier in motion. My time-lapse movie would focus on this living room. It would capture the top of the harpsichord, which is covered with heaps of catalogs and junk mail, the highlights being a 1990 DAK Industries catalog and a birthday card from dad’s sweetheart, J—.

Let’s say the filming spans a period from Dec. 1, 1990, to Jan 31, 1991, and is then condensed into twenty seconds of viewed footage. People in this movie appear for such a short time they are subliminal. Other objects, such as the DAK catalog, appear throughout the video and can be carefully examined. Exactly four seconds into the movie, the birthday card from J— magically appears near the center of the screen. Nothing changes for another four seconds; then, my Christmas presents suddenly appear in the lower left-hand corner. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I defied Dad’s concern for clutter and didn’t move the presents until I left for California. That means the presents would remain in the picture for seven seconds, and then vanish again. In the remaining five seconds, the DAK catalog and the birthday card remain, undisturbed.

The movie isn’t very interesting until we consider the sequel, in which we extend the time-lapse photography to encompass the span between Dec. 1, 1990, to Jan. 31, 2001, and is still condensed into twenty seconds. Now, the finished movie is somewhat different. The birthday card appears, for all practical purposes, instantly. It remains throughout the movie, along with the DAK catalog and all the other junk. For all the careful watching he can muster, the viewer is totally unable to spot the Christmas presents left by me in the lower left-hand corner. Only with the state-of- the-art video freeze-frame technology (which is really quite advanced in the year 2001!) can he finally spot the presents without going back to the original footage.

I will ask you to bear with me in one final version of this time-lapse-movie allegory. Let us assume we have a much bigger budget and have cameras positioned all over the house. Let us also add sound. Imagine that a team of skilled technicians is perusing all the footage from a video span beginning the night after my last brother left, Jan. 4, and ending Jan. 18, the day after I’m gone. This movie won’t be quite as condensed, making almost five minutes of viewed footage. You’ve seen, no doubt, time-laps films of something as simple as a night’s sleep, and have almost certainly felt awed at how much goes on during something as simple as sleep. That’s why you’ll be amazed at how little goes on in this movie.

The scene seems to linger on either my bed or the living room sofa. Certain cameras never see anything. The technicians are continually frustrated when not a single one of their cameras picks up any movement at all. The home viewer wants action, damn it, and out of two weeks of raw footage, they can’t even fill up five minutes with anything but sleeping and an occasional meal. The financial backers are threatening to pull out, and perhaps the worst of it is this actor, the star in fact, who keeps complaining, “There’s nothing here for me to do. I can’t get into this role at all ... you could get by with a clumsy actor, an extra. You could practically make do with a mannequin.”

Which I guess is my point. What am I doing here, anyway?

Bicycling in the Rain, or How To Be an Idiot

Introduction

With rain finally upon us (relieving for now a terrible drought here in the Bay Area), it’s time to talk about this ridiculous practice of riding a bicycle in the rain for fun and fitness.  I don’t mean getting caught in the rain, which can happen to any cyclist, or commuting in the rain, which is a noble activity that can involve fenders and such.  I’m talking about making a conscious decision to ride in the rain, which I did last Sunday, to my great misery.

This post should appeal to those with a yen for schadenfreude (look, two words—almost in a row— borrowed from another language!).  You can also read here about the strange notion of the "Reverse Murphy," and about why a cyclist who braves bad weather should never, ever begin to believe he's tough or something.  At the end I even have a surprising get-warm-quick recipe.

The idiocy of riding in crummy weather

For an amateur cyclist to train in bad weather is an affectation, like when a Master's racer dopes.  I mean, if you’re doing this sport as a hobby, and you’re not trying to make a living at it, there’s no point making yourself more miserable than necessary just to be better prepared for racing in crummy weather (which you should also avoid). I doubt you get better at tolerating cold with practice anyway. And, you’ll get a better workout on an indoor trainer, if you can handle the tedium. (Click here for motivational and logistical trips on training indoors.)

Besides, there’s the bike to think about.  Brake pads will usually last years if you only ride in dry weather, but in one or two wet rides (especially if your terrain is hilly, like mine) you can burn halfway through a pair.  Then there’s the time spent cleaning up your drivetrain; if you have that much time to kill, you should be training more, or—better yet—doing something truly worthwhile.  And if you go mountain biking in the rain, you severely damage the trail and basically sand away your drivetrain with all that grit.

So why did I ride?

Last Saturday night, I gave my bike a tune-up.  I filed the shellac off my new brake pads, cleaned everything up, and got my chain and cogs clean enough to eat off of.  I mixed up a couple bottles of energy drink for a Mount Diablo assault the next morning.  All this, even though I was certain it was going to rain.

Why was I certain?  After all, Accuweather said there was only a 25% chance of rain.  Well, it was simple Murphy’s Law:  whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.  And since I’d done such a nice job tuning up my bike, it had to rain.

Okay, so why didn’t I bail in advance, like the smartest of us four guys who had planned to ride together?  It’s because of this terrible drought we’ve been having.  It’s only rained once since last spring, and just barely.  All the liberals around here have been self-flagellating about it for two months.  So I figured I’d pull a Reverse-Murphy.  That is, I would cause it to rain—much as you’d do with a rain dance or cloud seeding—by tuning up my bike.  If I backed out of the ride, the drought would continue.

Being stupid in the rain

I woke up at 5:45 a.m. and went out on my porch.  No rain yet, but the wind in the trees was making a very specific sound, a slightly clattery whir that always means rain is imminent.  At about 6:30 I checked my e-mail; Todd had written, “My rain dance didn’t work (again), so Northside here I come.”  I figured he’d only looked out the window, and hadn’t noticed the special pre-rain breeze.

Fifteen minutes later I checked my e-mail again.  “Whoops,” Todd wrote.  “My rain dance worked after all.  Back to bed.”  Classic last-minute flakage but it wasn’t inappropriate … he’d signed on for this ride at the last minute anyway.  What I was looking for was an e-mail from Craig, who lives on the other side of the hills, an hour away from the coffee shop where we met.  Had he written, “It’s raining and frigid so I’m turning around,” I’d have probably bailed.  But no e-mail from Craig, meaning he was evidently well underway and toughing it out.  To stand him up and make him spend another miserable solo hour getting home while the rest of us slept … I couldn’t do that to a pal. 

I almost left on time, but when I got outside and found myself pummeled by some very big, very cold raindrops, I suddenly felt the urge to, uh, take care of post-digestive matters one more time.  You know about OCD; have you heard of its cousin, OCB?  Obsessive-Compulsive Bowels?  By the time I’d stripped off all my layers, done my business, and suited back up, I was running good and late.

I held out some hope that I’d roll up to the coffee shop and Craig wouldn’t be there.  I’d had this same hope on a similar winter morning in the early ‘90s when meeting up with my friend Trevor; when I saw him there, shivering in the rain, I thought, “Damn you to hell!”  He was, as he freely admitted, no happier to see me.

Of course Craig did show.  We steamed up Spruce Street, a nice uphill, and weren’t too cold then, but by the time we finished descending the east side of Wildcat Canyon Road to Orinda, we were completely drenched and miserable.  It was about 40 degrees out.  (I know, to most of the U.S. that’s downright balmy, but we Californians are a bunch of pansies.  Our routinely great weather makes us soft.) 

My shins felt like they’d been encased in ice.  I told Craig I’d escort him home but Mount Diablo was out of the question.  (A ten-mile descent in such weather would be the end of me.)  He suggested we ride out on the flats to Danville and then he could drive me home.  Drive me home?!  What would come next?  Aromatherapy and a subscription to “O, The Oprah Magazine”?  No way.

Riding home—the second hour of my ride—I just got colder and colder.  My feet felt like they were big blocks of ice.  The fingers of my fleece gloves became grotesquely distended with the wet, and when I wiped my nose I could taste all the salt the gloves had absorbed from sweat over the years, now carried away by the water.  Same with my helmet pads, though the water dripping from them also had a chemical taste.  My hands barely worked; shifting to a bigger cog was easy (swinging the palm of my hand like a hammer) but I could hardly click the smaller lever.  Most of all, I was too cold to even pedal hard, perhaps because my very spirit was waterlogged , soggy, and saggy.

I am not a hard man

When I was a teenager, I had this Coors Classic poster on my wall.  The cyclist pictured had thighs that literally gleamed.  Look, here it is now:

I’m going to admit something now.  In those years, riding in the mountains west of Boulder meant getting caught in thunderstorms not infrequently, and when I did, my legs—being wet—would gleam, and I would pretend I was the guy in the poster.  Laugh all you want, but haven’t you also fallen prey to mild narcissism at some point in your life?  It helped me brave some storms, anyway.  I wasn’t yet wise enough to be humble.

Well, I am now.   Slogging home through that incessant rain, I was too miserable, and feeling too sorry for myself, to feel like a badass.  I just felt stupid and lame.  I think it’s funny when some cycling fan bags on Cadel Evans for seeming a bit whiny during post-race interviews.  Did you see Evans in the Giro d’Italia last year?  (If not, click here or here for a blow-by-blow recap.)  Throughout the Giro it was raining most of the time, and snowing the rest of the time, and those poor guys had to not only brave the weather, but endure all the normal stress and strain of racing all-out.  I’d be bawling like a little girl after just one day of that, to say nothing of doing it for three weeks.  So I cut Evans plenty of slack.

And yet, even pro bike racers are nothing compared to 19th century sailors.   I’ve been reading Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., about his voyage around Cape Horn back in the early 1830s, in a ~100-foot merchant brig, and man, those guys knew how to suffer.  After all, they never had a choice.  Whenever the wind changed, which was pretty much a constant thing, they had to take in one sail or another, doing all kinds of complicated stuff with the rigging in all kinds of weather, day and night. 

For example, on one particularly stormy winter night near Cape Horn, the wind 

came on to blow worse and worse, with hail and snow beating like so many furies upon the ship, it being as dark and thick as night could make it.  The mainsail was blowing and slatting with a noise like thunder....  The yard over which we lay was cased with ice ... the sail itself about as pliable as though it had been made of sheets of sheathing copper.  It blew a perfect hurricane, with alternate blasts of snow, hail, and rain.  We had to fist the sail with bare hands.  No one could trust himself to mittens, for if he slipped, he was a gone man....  Frequently we were obliged to leave off altogether and take to beating our hands upon the sail, to keep them from freezing.

As cold as I was on my stupid little ride, I knew I’d be home in an hour or so, and the furnace would be going, and I’d have a hot shower and plenty to eat.  These guys?  They didn’t have a hot shower for over two years.  They’d go days or even weeks without dry clothes.  To eat they got nothing but salt beef, hard bread, and (on Sundays) a bit of duff (basically a steamed flour/water pudding).

At least last year’s luckless Giro riders didn’t have to worry about scurvy:  

The scurvy had begun to show itself on board.  One man had it so badly as to be disabled and off duty, and the English lad, Ben, was in a dreadful state, and was daily growing worse.  His legs swelled and pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so that if it was pressed in, it would not return to its shape; and his gums swelled until he could not open his mouth.  His breath, too, became very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would be a dead man in a week, at the rate at which he was sinking.  [After encountering another ship, and being given a whole bunch of onions], we carried them forward, stowed them away in the forecastle, refusing to have them cooked, and ate them raw, with our beef and bread.... It was like a scent of blood to a hound.  We ate them at every meal, by the dozen; and filled our pockets with them, to eat in our watch on deck.

Imagine sharing a tiny forecastle with a bunch of unwashed sailors, and getting diseased breath so awful that the constant eating of raw onions is actually an improvement.  What a place to return to after slaving away with frozen rigging on an iced-over deck for four hours at a time.  Needless to say, absolutely nothing involving a white collar middle-aged man in Lycra doing a winter bicycle ride in California could possibly compare.

How to warm up

I got home, dragged my bike up the steps to the porch, and stood there a moment wondering how I was going to manage to dig past the gels, the tool kit, and the bags of drink mix in my jersey pocket to fish out my house key.  Fortunately my wife heard me from inside and opened the door.  A blast of warm air hit me.  It took me a few minutes to remove my shoes and I rolled my bike, which was dripping black filth, down to the garage.  I couldn’t shower right away for fear of chilblains on my lily white feet.  You can see my feet weren’t doing very well:

I huddled over a heater vent for at least twenty minutes before my teeth stopped chattering.  I don’t remember what I ate but it wasn’t hot cocoa; I wasn’t in the mood.  I guess I’d have felt like a girl scout or something.  Once, after getting stuck in the rain and snow on a Diablo ride, I came home and ate some rollmops, just to embrace my northern European heritage.  (What?  You haven’t heard of  rollmops?  It’s raw herring wrapped around a dill pickle.)  But on this morning I was too dejected by the futility of it all to play games with food and we didn’t have any herring anyway.

What I didn’t consider until much later, when my brain had thawed out, was that to warm up properly I should have done what the sailors in Dana’s book did: 

Throughout the night it stormed violently—rain, hail, and snow, and the sleet beating upon the vessel—the wind continuing ahead, and the sea running high.  At day-break (about three, A.M.) the deck was covered with snow.  The captain sent up the steward with a glass of grog to each of the watch; and all the time that we were off the Cape, grog was given to the morning watch, and to all hands whenever we reefed topsails.

What is grog?  It’s basically watered-down rum, named after Admiral Vernon of the Royal Navy, who was nicknamed Old Grog after the grogram fabric of his coat.  (The word “groggy” stems from “grog.”) 

So, when I had some friends over a few nights later, I found a few (widely divergent) grog recipes, did some improvising, and made up some good grog—so good, in fact, I had to make a second batch.  Here’s the grog recipe I worked out (this makes one generous serving):

1½ to 2 oz. dark rum

½ ounce lime juice

1 tsp sugar

1 small dollop of molasses

4 oz. water

In a pot on the stove, heat the water to a boil.  Kill the heat.  Stir in the sugar until it dissolves.  (You could use brown sugar instead of sugar and molasses.)  Put in everything else and stir well.  Serve hot.  Do not garnish with an orange slice or a cinnamon stick, because do you think those totally badass sailors ever went in for fricking garnish?

The best part of this (admittedly inauthentic) grog?  Due to the lime juice, you won’t get scurvy!

Postscript

If we’d stuck to our original plan and ridden up Mount Diablo, we’d have been snowed on.  Look! 

From the Archives - Trouble with Tire Chains

Introduction

Shortly after Christmas in 2004, which my family had spent with my mom in Phoenix, Oregon (a great mythical town rising up out of its own Ashland), we got caught in a bit of a blizzard driving home to the Bay Area, and had a terrible time with our tire chains. I wrote a story about it which ended up running in a local chain of newspapers under the headline “DRIVER KEEPS WARM BY SEETHING ABOUT CHAIN REQUIREMENTS.” (My wife had been a journalist at the chain and was close personal buds with the editor.) They cut out the second half of my story, but otherwise changed very little. I was impressed with that. Look, here it is now:

We’ve had a pretty exciting winter with gobs of rain, which means snow in the mountains. Check out this recent photo of I-80 near Donner Pass:

In honor of all that snow, I now offer you my original tire chain story, intact. In the words of a waiter at my favorite San Francisco Thai restaurant, “Enjoy please enjoy.”

The Trip Home – Dec 28, 2004

When we started our trip back from Oregon I had a feeling of dread—not about the dangerous road conditions, since the falling snow was melting instantly on contact with the ground—but about the probable insult of being required by the Department of Transportation to install chains in such conditions. And sure enough, as we approached the base of Siskiyou Pass, the traffic slowed way down and countless motorists pulled over and began their struggle. We tuned into the highway condition radio station, and learned that DOT was indeed requiring chains on Siskiyou Pass for all vehicles except four-wheel-drives.

Now before I launch into my tale, I must digress for a moment to share with you my feelings about Siskiyou Pass. The way locals talk about it, you’d think early mountaineers got stuck there and ate each other, but it’s really nothing. In Colorado it would be ashamed to call itself a pass. Riding over it on a bike would be a minor workout, not worth braving the traffic for. It climbs maybe 3,000 feet. About its only authentic feature is that it has runaway truck ramps.

I also need to vent for a minute about tire chains. The insult of installing chains is twofold. First, the tendency of DOT to require them in merely wet conditions should insult anybody’s intelligence. Using chains on a wet road makes about as much sense as wearing a condom in a public restroom to keep from getting AIDS from the toilet seat. The real risk is that I’ll have a heart attack from the rage I’m filled with when I consider how many people must get run over as they dink around on the shoulder, too distracted by the difficulties of their chain installation to remember that there are cars whizzing by. Then there are the stories you hear about chains coming off and wrapping around the axle. Those terrify me, because I’ve witnessed, many times, the horrific bicycle equivalent of such a thing. For example, my old buddy David Pinter’s long Dr. Who scarf got caught in his rear wheel once because he didn’t maintain the velocity necessary to keep it streaming gloriously behind him. Or take my college roommate, whose jersey, which he’d foolishly wrapped around his mountain bike’s bars to expose his strapping upper body, went right into the front wheel and flipped him over the bars. The potential consequences of a tire chain tangling in the axle of my car could be much, much worse. And yet it’s a very real possibility—you see dead chains all over the road, standing in stark relief on the black, yes, totally black, shiny black, not snow-white road surface.

The second part of the insult is that I’ve only once managed to install tire chains on my own. They’re not intuitive, at least not to me, and the instructions are about as helpful as instructions always are—that is, not. And yet you see people, regular people like you and me, dutifully working at it, out in the cold on the side of the road. As you roll by these guys, putting off the inevitable, hoping there’ll be a last-minute telegram from the governor pardoning everybody, you get about a ten-second glimpse into each individual’s struggle. I’ve never looked over to see a motorist who obviously has the task well in hand; each guy seems to be taking the tangled web back off his tire and staring at it. But I have to assume some, probably even a majority, of these people get them on there okay—which is amazing considering that as a society, America hasn’t even gotten a handle on its damn car alarms. But as long as those other guys are out there fighting the fight, I feel like a wuss paying one of the professionals in their overalls. So on top of insulting my intelligence, the chain requirement insults my very manhood, which is probably even worse.

I was kind of hoping Erin would have some very compelling and forceful argument why I should just pay one of the guys from the get-go, and in the spirit of not introducing marital discord I could sigh and say, “Yes, dear.” But this didn’t seem to occur to her. I pulled over and started to get out, and she said something like, “Wear your gloves, dear, you don’t want your hands to get cold.” Okay, this probably bears little resemblance to what she said, but it’s how my male ego translated it.

I screwed around with the chains for awhile. The instructions were gone. The chains seemed much, much too short. Insults one and two, like Thing 1 and Thing 2 in Dr. Seuss, pranced around and taunted me—these are unnecessary! you're not a real man!—until I was too angry to logically suss out the chain installation. I got back in the car and kept driving.

Traffic was getting slower and slower as more and more motorists began the process of wasting their time and energy in the abominably pointless project. Eventually we saw an old dude in coveralls standing by the road, apparently car-less, so we figured he was one of the tire chain professionals. I called out to him. Either he didn’t understand me or couldn’t hear me, because it took a long time before we understood that he was in fact a chain guy, and he understood that yes, we wanted his services. He spent a good 20-30 minutes fighting with my chains, during which time he had me pull forward and then roll back dozens of times. Each time I pulled forward I shut the engine off afterward, not wanting to gas the poor guy.

How many times would my car start? It’s not a great starter. The battery has been run down too many times, and there’s a relay problem somewhere, and in my black leather work bag I have a little burned-out fuse that I’ve been meaning for months to buy non-burned-out replicas of, to stash in the glove box. (Last time the car died, my mechanic recommended I lay in a supply.) Compounding my nervousness about all the pulling forward and backing up was the nagging fear that sooner or later I was bound to run over the guy. Whenever he yelled for me to stop, I was sure I’d rolled over and crushed him.

Once the chains were on, the car drove like hell. It felt like I’d removed the tires and was driving on the rims down a railroad track, across which somebody had thrown an I-beam every five feet. Rough the whole time, with an extra thump every revolution: WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! At certain speeds it would smooth out a bit, and then it would get even worse when I crossed some other invisible speed threshold. And of course in the traffic I didn’t get to choose my speed.

We made our way up the pass, very slowly. Everywhere you looked on the shoulder motorists were fiddling with chains. Even SUVs were pulled over, their drivers installing chains on their own recognizance, just to be safe. Over and over again the radio announced that chains were required on all vehicles except for four-wheel-drives. What were these SUV guys thinking? Were they just dying to try out the new chains that they’d bought from Kragen? Or was it that they love a natural disaster, and installing chains made this one official, the way a souvenir from Niagara Falls makes your trip there more real? Or were these the type of extraordinarily risk-averse people who wear a belt and suspenders at the same time, and buy extended warranties for every $20 boom box or electric carving knife they buy, and find somebody to sue every time reality catches up with them and sullies their safe little imaginary world?

We passed the chain control checkpoint and there were a couple of bored looking kids sitting in a DOT pickup truck, eyes glazed. A giant sign with big orange lights said “Chains required when lights are flashing,” but the lights weren’t flashing. Had the kids simply forgotten to turn them on? Or was the radio announcement wrong? The thought that I could have gotten away with not using chains was almost too hideous to contemplate. Every so often we saw a car like ours, driving blissfully unprotected up the mild, wet grade, and my blood boiled. We passed over the top of the so-called pass and there was no sign of snow, slush, or ice. We descended the other side and still nothing. It was slow going. How fast can you drive with chains? I had no idea. I kept it around 35.

About five miles from Yreka, the first town you reach after leaving Ashland, the starboard chain burned up in the atmosphere. It had been making extra noise for some time, and I’d already pondered the fact that the port chain took at least 20 minutes to install and the starboard not more than 10. Maybe the chain guy took a shortcut. So when the chain came off I wasn’t really that surprised, and since it was a clean break, I wasn’t worried about it wrapping around the axle. In fact, I was mildly exhilarated. Free at last! The ride became 50% smoother and I knew I’d never have to look at the damn thing again. Now I began to wish for the port-side chain to go, to finish the apotheosis from crippled thumping to quiet rolling.

I got my wish, sort of. Just before Yreka the port chain did break, but instead of coming completely off, it hung around, jingling cheerily. I pulled over onto the shoulder and got out to look. Sure enough, it had wrapped itself completely around the axle. Oddly, I wasn’t particularly angry. Having feared this scenario so acutely, I’d come to think of it as inevitable. Also mitigating my anger was the delicious realization that once I’d removed this chain, probably by cutting it into little bits, the stinking pair of them would be gone from my life forever.

We drove into Yreka. We pulled into a gas station. Like I-5, the place was packed. I pulled into line for a pump. One driver was ahead of me, and he decided to install his chains right then and there. Maybe he was taking advantage of the shelter from the falling snow. Needless to say he took forever. He seemed oddly cheerful about the whole thing: Oh, boy, I get to put on my chains! After ten minutes of watching him, I finally reached the breaking point. In a moment of Zen perfection, I managed to remove the tangled tire chains from my axle and strangle him with them, all in a single fluid motion, and then I leapt to the gas station roof like the characters in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” From here I came back down to reality and asked the gas station clerk if she had any bolt cutters. She didn’t.

Finally I got my turn at the pump. Erin was still changing Lindsay’s diaper when I finished, and she recommended I check the oil. I went back in to buy a quart, asked the clerk if there was a mechanic in town who would be open on a Sunday. She didn’t know, but one of the men in line offered alternative advice, which is what I’d actually been hoping for. He gave me directions to a hardware store that would be open.

I found the place and they had one pair of bolt cutters. They were good ones: 36-inch dual purpose. Dual purpose? Yes. Of course they could cut bolts, but they would also function as my favorite bike shop tool, the one I liked to call The Persuader. The Persuader at the bike shop was a big hammer, but these bolt cutters were even better. They weighed a ton. If you could get a good swing into those babies, you could probably knock down a brick wall. Their potential as a bludgeon of inanimate objects was promising, in case the chain-cutting failed.

As soon as I paid for the bolt cutters I feared that they’d do me no good, that I just wasted my money. It was already starting to get dark, and I couldn’t see much under the car. My jack was in the back, buried under tons of gear, and my bike was obstructing the tailgate, lashed down with string, and anyway I seemed to remember that you shouldn’t crawl under a jacked-up car that has passengers in it, and I wasn’t about to ask my family to stand around in the cold and snow.

One thing I’ve learned through several automotive breakdowns is that there are always men around, even on a chilly Sunday evening, who materialize like fairy godmothers (though of course they never look anything like fairies or mothers) and dispense advice or at least (as in the case of a dead battery) a good push. Such a guy appeared and—apparently sizing up the situation entirely on his own, within about five seconds—said, “What you want to do is drive up on a curb with the left wheels. That’ll give you a bit more room under there.” I nodded, said that was a great idea. “I wish I could be more help,” he apologized. He looked sincerely bummed that that was the best he could do. Then suddenly he had another idea. “Down the road there’s a U-Haul guy who does chains,” he said. “You might look for him.”

We drove down the road, chain dragging behind us like the Ghost of Christmas Past. I found the U-Haul guy. He was either closed for the day or nobody knew about him. He had a trailer in front of a low building that looked to have once been a gas station. I told him what was going on, and my strategy with the bolt cutters. He didn’t say, “Aw, heck, I have a better idea. Stay in the car, I’ll take care of everything!” Not that I was really disappointed at this; my fantasy was somewhat more modest: he would have a car jack, maybe even a hydraulic lift so I could cut those chains into tiny bits from a comfortable standing position. “Sorry, all my jacks are broken,” he said, evidently reading my mind. “You can pull under the overhang, though.”

I pulled under there and rolled the port wheels up onto the curb of his porch. I got out. Not much light left at all. In fifteen minutes or so it’d be dark. Even beneath the overhang the ground was filthy and wet—probably no better than the road. The U-Haul chain guy strolled over to watch. I imagine that a chain guy doesn’t mind watching somebody else sprawl out on the ground for a change. His expression conveyed a mixture of amusement and curiosity. I imagined he was sizing me up: is this effete-looking white-collar boy really going to mix it up with the bolt cutters beneath his car? Of course he may not have been thinking this at all, but given the circumstances it sure seemed that way to me. I might as well have been preparing to sing karaoke in front of a famous rock group. Maybe he was going to wait until I’d totally given up, humiliating myself in the process, before stepping in and rescuing us. Or maybe he was going to watch me melt down and then get into his truck and drive off.

No way was I going to foul up my Gore-Tex parka, nor the wool sweater beneath it, so I stripped down to my t-shirt. I’m sufficiently claustrophobic that I shudder even remembering what I did next. I crawled under there, lying on my back and pushing myself along with my feet, which stuck out beyond the car. I could now reach with the bolt cutters and, using highly indirect tactile cues, find links of the chain to cut. Of course, to get the jaws open wide enough to span the chain links, I had to open the handles up all the way, which was more than my arms could handle given the confined space. So I had to use one arm on one handle and brace the other along my neck and torso. The car continuously drooled black water into my eyes and ears, and I was fighting off the panic of claustrophobia, and the handle was less than comfortable against my neck, and the links were hard to grasp and surprisingly strong, but from the first successful snap of a link I knew motivation was not going to be a problem. God that felt good, hurting the tire chain. I had to have that feeling again. I was instantly a tire-chain-cutting junkie. It’s a rare thing to commit vandalism and effect a repair at the same time. Again and again I opened the jaws, hunted around for a good bite, and crushed them shut, like a voracious beast. My favorite line from a James Bond book sounded in my head:

Die damn you die die damn you die damn you die damn you die

Meanwhile, above me, Erin chatted with the chain guy. He owns a landscape supply place, which basically means he sells rock and soil products that, by virtue of creating backyard paradises, command a non-trivial price. He also does the landscaping himself, and gets a lot of clients wanting him to build rock pools or some such thing. (I wasn’t getting all the details, because I was grunting like a pig caught in a trap, which I basically was.) The chain service was just a tertiary business. “I love doing the chains,” he said. I was dumbstruck by this proclamation until he went on to explain that he makes $1,000 a day doing it. I wondered how much of that he has to pay to the DOT for requiring chains, and suddenly the whole business made perfect sense—simple extortion. (Only the SUV drivers still defied explanation.)

I had to come out a couple times for air. Not for actual air, of course, but for the sensation of breathing freely, which is the only cure for claustrophobia. My t-shirt was soaked, my arms and hands filthy, my numb fingers cut up from dragging on the undercarriage of the car. I spat filth from my mouth and wiped it from my eyes. It was terribly difficult to raise the gumption necessary to slide back under. I was a guy rescued from a collapsed mine who had to go back in to retrieve his car keys. But each time I was won over by the burning desire to vandalize that damn chain some more.

I’d just finished the bulk of the cutting when Erin called down to see if I was making any progress. I grabbed the largest mass of chains and hurled them out from under the car, triumphantly and yet disgustedly, like when you extricate a mouse-sized wad of hair from the sink drain and fling it toward the trash. No, it was even better: I was a physician in South America who’d just dragged, from a small child’s throat, a three-foot tapeworm and then hurled it, still wriggling, onto the dirt floor of his jerry-rigged clinic. But there was still one piece of chain in there I couldn’t get at. Only a few inches of it hung down: enough to cause problems? I slid out from beneath the car to ponder the matter and consult with the chain guy.

Coming at the problem from the other direction, ahead of the wheel, he fished his arm expertly within the wheel well and in a jiffy had the last foot of chain out of there. Whew. I picked up some handfuls of snow and started scrubbing my arms with them. The guy invited me to head inside his shop to wash up. Erin brought my sweater and coat, and five minutes later we were back on the road, gliding wonderfully and quietly along. It was dark when we got back on I-5. Almost immediately we saw a big electric sign: “WARNING – CHAINS REQUIRED 20 MILES AHEAD – CARRY CHAINS.” Unbelievable. The road was still just wet. Erin and I, once recovered from our disbelief, agreed that we hadn’t seen the sign. [Note: this is where the newspaper version of this story ended.]

Traffic was still terribly heavy and slow. The shoulder was littered with stopped motorists tinkering with their chains. Installing them? Removing them? Tightening them? Just going through the motions for no reason, like a kid who’s mastered the Rubik’s Cube and yet solves it endlessly? Impossible to tell. After an hour we’d made it about ten miles: halfway between Yreka and Weed. Then traffic stopped entirely. A minute passed, five more after it, then another ten. I shut off the engine and killed the lights. Erin asked a trucker if he’d heard anything on the CB. “Yeah, they keep changing their mind. First they’re going to close the road, then they’re going to open it, then they’re going to require chains.” It was snowing pretty hard, as it had been all day, but the ground was still just wet. What is going on here? I thought. The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Cats and dogs living together. French nuclear-powered submarines.

We brought Lindsay and Alexa up to our laps and spread out a sleeping bag. The guy ahead of us climbed out of his big strapping SUV (engine still running) and stood in the road. He paced around a bit, without a coat on, and stared out at the day. Sure, he wasn’t doing anything useful per se, but perhaps in that moment he felt like Jason Bourne: acutely aware of every possibility, every contingency, instinctively tuned in to all the angles. Like a crouching cat, he could spring into action at any moment. Eventually he decided to put on his tire chains. Now, I don’t know whether he was just having a hard time with them, or was deliberately savoring the activity, but he proceeded to work those chains for at least the next forty minutes. I watched, torn between bemusement and relief: at least he didn’t shame me by snapping those babies on in five minutes flat. He must have pulled forward and backed up a hundred times.

Make no mistake about it: this was no natural disaster. Rather, it was a completely unnecessary annoyance, visited upon us not by an angry god but by an incompetent human, or worse, an incompetent committee. I pictured a dingy office with a few civil servants in it, drinking stinking vending machine coffee and arguing over what to do. Maybe they were gridlocked, or maybe they had an even number of people and no majority vote, or maybe they didn’t have the authority to open the road and were trying to hunt down the guy who did, who was out bowling or whose cell phone was in his other pants. Or perhaps the committee was on a power trip, playing God, and had decided it would be fun to strand everybody for however long it took for the roads to actually become dangerous, and then open the roads and take bets on how many cars went into the ditch.

In some ways, a natural disaster would have been easier to stomach. If our life had been in danger, we could have switched into some survival mode that was beyond anger and frustration. But as long as my car’s battery held up, we could survive for days, starting the engine and running the heater for five minutes every hour or so. An endless supply of water was falling from the sky, organized into snow for our gathering convenience. Sure, Alexa had run out of diapers, but only when she sleeps for eight hours or so does she need them, and anyway nobody ever died from a bad smell. Granted, we weren’t particularly comfortable. To fit all our gear in the car I’d set my seat farther forward than I’d have liked, and of course our children could lose patience and start bawling at any moment. But our little family wasn’t exactly the Donner party.

A young guy with a crewcut wearing nothing but sneakers, jeans, and an LAPD t-shirt stalked sullenly up and down the road. He didn’t appear to be looking for anybody, and I couldn’t fathom what he was doing out there. Just a jumpy guy who can’t sit still? Or was he forestalling panic by proving to himself that it wasn’t that cold out? Or was he performing a public service by inspiring the rest of us, especially the women? After all, he did embody a high plane of human resilience and stoicism. I wished I’d brought my hip flask. With that prop, I’d have had the nerve to join him out there. We’d silently pass the flask back and forth as we brooded over big manly thoughts. Instead, I sat in the car and beeped my kids’ noses.

We passed about two and a half hours like this. It had been seven or eight hours since we’d last eaten, so we started in on our provisions. Having planned to eat at a great Mexican restaurant in Redding, we hadn’t packed a picnic, but we had leftover plum pudding from Mom and a foil bag of organic chocolate truffles from Dad. Whoa. Culinary nirvana. Alexa and I wolfed pudding while Erin frantically prepared unchokeable bites for Lindsay, who howled her impatience. I’ve never had better truffles. Next to us, a man who looked to be in his late sixties stepped out of his car. I opened my door and asked if he’d heard anything. He eagerly approached and we chatted. Moments later he and his wife had presented us with a half a deli sandwich, untouched, and several mandarin oranges. We passed around the truffles. “I’m from Colorado,” he said, and I know exactly what he would say next. I wasn’t wrong: as he pawed at the wet asphalt with his foot he said, “There, we wouldn’t worry about this. We’d just drive.” I felt vindicated. At last, another motorist who knows the difference between truly treacherous conditions and silly make-believe crises.

And then, suddenly, activity! The line was starting to move! The old couple got back in their car, and Erin and I frantically worked to get the kids back in their car seats. About thirty seconds into this process the guy behind me ran up to my window. “We’re moving!” he said anxiously, as though we suddenly had just five minutes to rush through the terminal and catch our connecting flight. I shrugged him off (which was a very polite response compared to the vast supply of smart-assed responses I hold in store for such occasions) and once the kids were set, I started the engine and rolled forward to fill the 50-foot gap that had opened up ahead of us. Then we sat for another fifteen minutes or so. Erin and I decided that the movement was probably the result of a few cars up ahead, perhaps miles ahead, whose drivers lost patience and took off across the median to the northbound lane to head back to Yreka.

Over the next hour we made it ten more miles. Perhaps a mile before the first exit for Weed we saw another chain inspection station. Countless cars squatted in the shoulder as their drivers futzed around them. Erin and I worked on our no-chains story. We had two strategies.

One strategy called for full disclosure: we used to have chains, but they broke, and we had to cut one of them off, and now we have no chains but I’m a competent snow driver from Colorado, a place with real winters. Exhibit A was the bolt cutters, Exhibit B the empty chain box. But this strategy had problems. First of all, the Highway Patrol may have a zero tolerance policy and thus may not accept explanations. Second, depending on the actual cop, mention of my Coloradan heritage—and its implicit suggestion that California drivers suck at driving in snow—might affront him. Third, the guy might be just an all-around jerk with a bias against Volvo drivers, blonds, cyclists (my bike was on the car, remember), or motorists in general. Lots of moving parts to this strategy.

So our second strategy was to lie about our car. This had worked once before, during a ski trip in Erin’s old company car, a Chevrolet Lumina. With casual confidence and breezy authority, I’d told the inspector it was four-wheel drive, and he’d nodded and waved us right on through. It was worth a shot, I figured. But that guy hadn’t been a cop. Are all cops experts on car makes and models? Are they required to know when Volvo started doing All-Wheel-Drive wagons? Or maybe the cop wouldn’t care. Maybe it’s a hassle turning motorists around. Erin postulated that the bike on the back might make the car look more sporty, and thus more 4WD-ish. We pondered the matter silently for a few minutes. Then I decided to practice my lie on Erin. With complete conviction, I looked her right in the eye and said, “Are you aware that this car is full-time four-wheel drive?” She looked legitimately surprised. “Really?” she said. “Then there’s no problem!” Erin is no fool—I simply have the ability to lie very convincingly. But would it be enough?

In the event, we determined on the fly to say nothing and act natural. I withheld the temptation to lower my window or look at the inspector. He waved us through, or at least seemed to, in my peripheral vision. For the next few minutes (that is, the next 100 yards) I half expected a cop car to pull up and bust me, but it never happened. We were okay, at least for the time being.

We took the first exit into Weed, and once off the main drag I noted that the road was, finally, completely covered in snow. I did some very subtle steering experiments and decided the conditions were perfect for doing tricks. Had I still been a teenager, without a family in the car, I’d have spent the next couple of hours sliding all over the streets of Weed, fishtailing around corners, doing doughnuts in parking lots, and celebrating the dual gift of a rear-wheel drive car and a beautiful snowstorm. Instead I drove carefully under the highway to Taco Bell and parked.

Twenty minutes, seventeen dollars, some 3,000 calories, and a couple dozen packets of “Fire” sauce later, we headed back out there. It was still snowing hard, a strong wind was blowing, and the roads had become legitimately treacherous. It’s likely that people’s tire chains were finally doing them some good. The driving wasn’t all that hard without chains, though. The highway continued to descend, and wound through some gentle curves and over some bridges, and sure, I could have lost traction at any point by accelerating abruptly, hitting the brakes, steering too quickly, or responding poorly to having done any of these things, but I was fine as long as I moved around gradually, limited my speed to about 30, and didn’t touch the brakes for the next forty miles. My only real fear was the number of SUVs that cruised by at relatively high speed, their drivers convinced that a big masculine heavy vehicle cannot lose traction. We did see perhaps a dozen vehicles that had slid off the road, but in general everyone was okay. Oddly, the Highway Patrol was nowhere to be seen, until we came across the chain inspection point, across the highway, for northbound traffic. Eventually the snow turned to rain, and the rest of the drive was uneventful. The kids even slept, and Alexa amazed us by not urinating in her car seat. We reached home at about 4:00 AM. The six-hour drive had taken more than fourteen hours.

As Erin put the kids in their beds, I unloaded the car. When the bike was back in the garage and the rear cargo area finally emptied, I lifted the lid that covers the tools, jumper cables, etc. and confirmed what I’d long suspected: we had a second set of car chains in there, the more modern kind, in their original box with instructions. I thought about hurling them in the garbage, and replacing them with Exhibits A & B (bolt cutters and empty box) for future trips. Then I sighed and put them back in the car. I might actually need them some day.

dana albert blog

Winter Storm

Introduction

We’ve had some real weather in the Berkeley area lately, including a crazy thunderstorm last Friday. This post concerns weather, weather forecasts, and that amazing winter storm. Guest commentary is provided by my daughter Alexa.

Weather

If I were marketing The Weather, I’d tout it as “America’s favorite conversational topic!” It’s hard to go wrong with it—who doesn’t care about the weather?—unless it strays into political territory (e.g., climate change). There’s little risk, when discussing weather, that you’ll broach the other forbidden topics, sex and religion. But it has often occurred to me that discussing the weather can be a little awkward because it’s such an obviously safe topic for light conversation. Bringing it up can suggest you’re deliberately tiptoeing around some taboo subject.

I was very glad about this last storm, because the narrow range of weather in this area has become my latest source of parental guilt. Where my family lives we almost never get a proper thunderstorm, and certainly never the thrill of waking up to see the whole neighborhood buried in fresh snow. If the American Dream is to give your kids more than you had, I’m letting my daughters down, because growing up in Colorado I enjoyed a great many summer thunderstorms and overnight snowfall.

Weather forecasting

Forecasting the weather must be a really easy job. Not that it isn’t complicated, of course, but the customer has no recourse when the forecast is wrong—which it so frequently is. Weather.com forecasts the temperature hour by hour, but every single morning when I check the temperature (on their website) it’s a few degrees cooler than they said it would be. If all they did for a forecast was to measure the temperature once per hour and use these values as their predictions for the next several weeks, they’d do a better job.

Do weather forecasters use a Ouija board? I suspect not. They probably just steal their weather information from somebody else. After all, who could possibly catch them in the act? Meteorology seems pretty precise, especially with the satellite images we all nod at on TV or online, but of course we’re not really capable of extracting meaning from the images. They’re just something for the weatherman to gesture at.

Twice this year my family has made bold outings in defiance of the forecasts. A few weeks ago we took a two-day trip to hang out on the beaches south of here, despite an emphatic prediction of nothing but rain for both days. Here’s what we got:

The other trip was to ski up near Lake Tahoe. The forecast for Sunday was rain all day, which of course would have made for lousy skiing. Instead, it only snowed a bit, and we enjoyed sparsely populated slopes and no lift lines.

Even the basic weather forecasting terminology is a bit of a farce. The weatherman loves to talk about “high pressure systems,” which we all studied and halfway grasped in junior high, but it’s basically a throwaway phrase. Even the difference between “rain” and “showers” is a bit of a mystery. My wife asked me about this this morning I replied, “A shower is when water falls from the sky—in fact, when water actually rains down on you from the sky—but it isn’t actually rain.”

The weather forecast in the UC Santa Barbara student paper, the Daily Nexus, was never wrong. This wasn’t because the weather down there was totally predictable (though it was), but because the person who did the weather section never so much as mentioned the weather. The “forecast” was more like a snapshot of whatever was on the person’s mind. I see that the format hasn’t changed:

Back in the day, these “forecasts” were much wittier than this, and I don’t remember seeing typos. Or am I just becoming bitter as I age?

Movie night

The big storm I mentioned earlier happened when my family was at Movie Night at the elementary school. Though there had been rain on and off during the day, the sky had cleared up by evening and we didn’t expect much more rain. We’d have walked to the school but we were running late. We wore light jackets and normal shoes.

At a fundraising auction I’d won the VIP Movie Night Extravaganza Package, meaning my kids got to bring a friend “for free,” and we got special seating, and got to come in through an exclusive side door, were given a big bucket of candy, and got a whole pizza instead of just buying slices à la carte. We even got wine masquerading as juice boxes. No, none of this has anything to do with the storm. I’m just bragging.

So I sat there with an entire pizze box on my lap, feeling like royalty, the kids distracted by candy, watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," a movie that had terrified me as a kid. Occasionally a younger child would start bawling or try to flee the place, which gave me a strange satisfaction that the world hasn’t really changed. Soon I became drowsy as the starchy pizza crust worked its magic. During the scene where a chocolate bar, and then Mike Teavee, are turned into TV signals, all the characters are dressed in white suits from head to toe (like in Intel ads), and my foggy brain began making incongruous connections with the scene in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask” where a bunch of spermatozoa, also dressed in white from head to toe, prepare for their kamikaze one-way journey. The mental pairing must have been too much for my brain because the next thing I knew, I awoke with a sore neck to the sound of thunder outside. The movie was winding down but a storm was gathering momentum.

The storm

As soon as the movie ended, lots of kids ran to the doorway to watch. The thunder had been getting progressively louder during the film and we had been catching flashes of lightning through the windows. As my daughter Alexa recounted, “All of the kids started screaming when there was thunder and it was shocking how loud it was. I [once] went to a drum performance and they had an eight-hundred pound drum but the thunder was louder. The lightning lit up the sky and the scary part was the fact that it could have hit us.” (The day after the storm I asked Alexa to write down her recollections so I could quote from them, which is why I have this verbatim.)

Right as we came out the door and were standing under the overhang of the roof, it started pounding down hail. This hail persisted and began to accumulate in vast amounts like shag carpet over the playground. Alexa recalls, “The hail was almost the size of marbles and the ground was completely covered with a sheet of it. There was so much hail on the ground that it looked like snow.” Dozens of kids just stood there staring.

Then came a thunderclap of Colorado proportions. Instead of just a rumble, it was a boom you could almost feel, coupled with a distinct CRACK! sound. My younger daughter, Lindsay, shrieked and jumped up into my arms. I carried her back into the school auditorium where she began wriggling in my arms, trying to break free. Was I too close to the door? Did she want to crawl under something? No, she ran right back outside to watch some more!

I figured it was only a matter of time before the first kid ran out into the playground and started dancing around in the ankle-deep hail. No more hail was falling but frigid rain was still hammering down, and for at least a couple minutes nobody moved. But then, sure enough, some kid ran out there, and then everybody followed, shrieking and dancing around and making snowballs out of the hail to hurl at each other. “The hail was like quicksand,” Alexa recounted, “a layer of ice floating on top of water.” Lindsay ran back to me and gave me her popcorn, to free up her hands, so I had a snack for the second show.

Eventually the adults got tired of being beaten by giant icy raindrops and we started for home. We’d had to park several blocks from the school and the sidewalks were completely flooded. In Alexa’s words, “As the hail melted, rivers of water ran across the ice.” The water gushed along, running over the tops of our shoes. The rain reactivated my hair gel. Our thin jackets were soaked through. We got to the car. The hail had turned to a soggy mush of snow, like if Kix cereal were left in milk too long, so my wife had me drive. (As a teenager, most of the driving I did was in the snow, just for fun. My brother Bryan and our friends and I practiced power-slides, parking-brake slides, and doughnuts in a parking lot until we were skilled enough to take our chances in Boulder’s nicer neighborhoods, fishtailing with great aplomb, doing 180-degree skid turns around medians and such. Now, having become a responsible adult while maintaining my slippery-driving skills and relative sang-froid, I’m the family’s designated snow driver.)

It took several minutes for the windshield defogger to clear things up enough to even see. The windshield wipers were working overtime, pushing piles of sleety snow, or snowy sleet, out of the way. I gave the car a little extra gas pulling away from the curb to test the slipperiness of the roads. The car squirmed around a bit before straightening out: the roads were perfect for snow tricks (and skeetching, if the kids here knew anything about that). But, I restrained myself and drove carefully. The kids were delighted to watch giant congealed raindrops hitting the moonroof. The white road had sections of brilliant color: the hail had driven thousands of non-dead (undead? living?) leaves from the trees and they carpeted the snowslush.

We got to our house and the low point of the property down at the street intersection was completely flooded. It was a lake. Alexa begged me to find her a ruler, and while I raked masses of leaves from the drain grate, she measured the depth. (“The water was 5 inches deep in the shallow end,” she wrote later.) When I finished clearing the leaves from the street drain, water whooshed into it like a fire hydrant.

Photos

I wish I had some. It was dark. It was wet. I don’t bring a camera to the movies, and after the flood measurements and abatement we were pretty busy with hot baths, pajamas, and the debriefing and calming down operations. Oh well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps this post is worth 1.8 pictures.

dana albert blog