judygailkrasnow.com

That’s right. I haven’t been moving on this blog for months. But I have sure been moving. Most folks look forward to retiring somewhere around age 65, and that retirement often means from a cold climate to the warmth and adult communities of sunny Florida. Well, I have looked to my years heading on towards 70 with a totally different slant.

After 26 years in the sunshine state, I have moved to Michigan, and I did so in the dead of what Michiganders have called “the most brutal winter they’ve seen in at least ten years.” I can’t believe I made it through to the sun shining through my window today as spring attempts in mid-April to push its lovely head through the cold. I made it through scraping ice off of my van’s windows to get to the bank, grocery store or wherever else I have had to go. I even made it home one night though I hadn’t driven in snow for over 30 years, not since my children were small and we lived first in New York City and then in Nyack on the Hudson.

I was, some 40 miles away from Jackson, my home, enjoying the town of Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. A storm blew up, and did it ever blow. My usually tan and now whitening cheeks grew cherry red as the icy snow beat against them as I fought the wind to get back to my car. The traffic was horrid on the one lane in each direction road that would normally take me to I-94 in ten minutes. Instead, I sat, bumper-to-bumper — an experience I hadn’t experienced in any part of Michigan I’d driven in so far. I was used to bumper-to-bumper from Miami where it becomes like another limb upon one’s body. But this night’s bumper-to-bumper was like none I’d ever experienced. My large, made for ice and snow windshield wipers were struggling against the icy flakes falling evermore rapidly upon the front window. As I sat wondering what I would do, namely how I would get back to Jackson, the gauge on the gas tank, which sometimes swings back and forth, went to near empty, and the light came on. Oh, my God! What if I ran out of gas just sitting in this snow growing ever wilder and thicker. I looked left and right. On this one-lane road there was nothing — no restaurant, no gas station, no house to knock on the door and plead for both a phone and a bathroom, as nerves were filling my bladder rapidly.

I knew there was a gas station on top of the hill, but the hill was growing farther and farther into the distance, actually disappearing like a ghost as the visibility grew whiter with clouds of snow filling the air. I prayed my blood pressure would not rise to panic levels and took deep breaths as I tried to remember where the gas tank had read prior to this sudden swing downwards and when I’d last filled the tank and how many long drives I’d taken since then. Not only was the visibility now getting clouded with blowing snow, but the sun was fast setting and night’s darkness casting its net over the snow making white flakes grow at first gray, then blacker by the minute.

Creep a few feet forward … turn the heat down so as not to use up gas … fingers feeling numb … turn the heat up once again just to defrost myself and the windshield that was laden with a growing layer of ice that the wipers couldn’t scrape off … creep, creep, creep … I could feel the car beginning to go up an incline … can it be … I’m starting up the hill, the long hill at the top of which is a gas station … Please, please God or whatever, however, wherever, let me just get to the gas station to fill the tank and empty my own — a bladder about to burst … creep, creep, creep … I can feel the hill getting steeper … creep, creep, creep … I see something that looks vaguely like a gas station in the distance … creep, creep, creep, creep, creep — stop — sit, sit, sit, no motion … creep again … sit, creep, sit, creep … YES! It is the gas station!

Another thirty minutes go by. The tank must be fuller than the light indicated, or else my guardian angel is sitting on my shoulder. At last! The gas station is truly visible and maybe 50 feet away. The road widens here into three big lanes. I can’t see, as my mirror is caked with nature’s precipitation. I open my window to a blast of cold air and snow, look out and my glasses quickly ice. I take them off and my eyelashes are now snowy white as it is snowing into my van, but I can at least see to get into the first left lane, then the second, then the turn lane as people are driving very slowly. I make it into the gas station. Hallelujah! First, I run in to empty my tank. Then I run out to fill up the van. It turns out the meter is totally whacked out. I had at least 6 more gallons. Well, thanks, is all I can say and feel.

Traffic is now at a standstill in each direction of this suddenly huge four-way intersection. I have no idea how I can get out to get back onto the road that will take me to I-94. I contemplate finding a motel for the night, but the prediction repeated on my car radio over and over is that the snow is expected to get worse, leaving perhaps 16 inches by morning, and I don’t relish the thought of living in a motel for two to three nights, and I don’t have my blood pressure medicine with me, and I don’t want to roam around looking for a pharmacy if the weather will be even worse than this. No, I will get onto I-94. The Michiganders have told me that snowplows tend to the roads quickly, that snow melts as all the cars driving home from work serve as a plow of sorts themselves. I can do it. I used to do it. What is 30 years in the scheme of things? It will be like riding a bicycle I tell myself — you never forget, it becomes part of the cellular memory.

How shall I ever get out of this gas station. There isn’t a space to drive out of any side of it. I decide to head for the road perpendicular to the one onto which I have to turn left. Some polite driver who can see through the blowing snow lets me into the right lane. There is no way I can get to the left to make that left turn. I will go straight until I find a place to turn around so I can drive back to make a right turn. I-94, bless you, I know you are not too far away, and my bladder is now empty and my gas tank full. Straight it is I go, and as I come upon it, I see a place demarcated for a U-turn. Slowly I enter it and sit, sit, sit, sit until some slow drivers are at enough of a distance for me to make my way into the crowded street with more bumper-to-bumper cars. I am lucky to wind my way to the most far right lane. It is one of the few times, perhaps the only one, that I am thrilled to be on the far right. I make it there just in time to make that longed-for right turn back onto the road that will take me to I-94. I can barely see, and the road that leads to the highway looks like it leads into a big motel whose name is covered with snow. I follow a pickup truck that made the turn onto this road that has a sign, “I-94 West.” I figure if it leads me into the motel, maybe I should take that as writing on the wall, a message to stay where a wrong turn has taken me. But no, the turn leads me onto a snow-covered I-94 where my fear of the tales of skidding on black ice overwhelm me. Again I breathe deeply telling my blood pressure not to hit the jackpot. I stay in the right lane at first in order to be an old-fart slow driver, the opposite of my usual heavy-foot on gas pedal driving learned for survival in Miami. However, the right lane has more ice and snow than the left lane which has defined car tracks, so I switch and put a half-heavy foot on the gas pedal to keep up with the also half-heavy feet on the gas pedals of the cars in front of me. Soon, the road widens to three lanes. An 18-wheeler is in the middle lane and I get into this lane to and follow this huge truck as it is going slow, flattening the snow as it drives. I stay behind it at a car’s length and trust that the truck driver knows what he is doing. Again, after a few miles, the road becomes two lanes. The truck moves into the right one, and I follow. I have a friend now, a guide, a snow plow of sorts, and my highly tense muscles relax just a smidgen. Then, the truck leaves I-94 at Exit 148. I have nine more exits to go without my friend. I stay at the speed the truck was going, but now change lanes according to how much snow I see in each lane at given points. It seems an eternity, but finally, I see the sign for Exit 139 and Cooper Street. I reach it, wind my way off of it, sigh with intense relief, turn left and am thrilled for the first time that the speed limit on this little road leading into downtown Jackson has a speed limit of 25mph.

Five minute later, I pull into the parking lot of Armory Arts Village to enter the renovated historic Jackson Prison that is now my home.  Coming Home to Prison has never felt so good. Prison, you ask? That’s another story.

Tune in for more. I’m settled in now, a Michigander myself, so Blog, I have returned to you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Author's Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.