The feeling of complete helplessness as I sat in the passenger seat and the car slid faster than I thought was fair, considering how slow we had been going, toward the extremely steep drop-off at the edge of the traffic circle was more than overwhelming. My life didn’t exactly flash before my eyes, but I did see the overturned car lying at the bottom of the hill with my children screaming in the backseat, while my hands clenched in my lap and Anders struggled to turn us out of the slide.
We ended up swinging around in a circle and came to rest facing backwards with our front bumper up on the center of the circle median, safely away from the edge. I sat still and breathed shallowly for several seconds. Anders slowly backed the car up and turned us around. None of us said a word. I think Karin slept through the whole thing, and Martin hadn’t understood what had just happened.
Anders drove slowly off up the road, the headlights illuminated the heavy, whirling snow, and after a few minutes during which I struggled with an incipient panic attack, I asked him to please slow down even more to a complete crawl until I was able to breathe normally. *shudder*
Once, when cap_killer and I were driving from Michigan to Chicago (or possibly the other way), we ran into a terrible snowstorm with slippery road conditions as we went around the “horn,” the bottom of Lake Michigan. At one point, on the highway, we also went into a tailspin, hitting a patch of ice, and slid around in a circle to end up with the front end of our car in the path of the oncoming traffic that had been behind us seconds earlier…sitting in shocked silence as a huge truck roared past us, literally inches away.
It snowed all day yesterday and most of the night. The temperature was hovering around zero but the snow was so heavy and so wet that a lot of it was melting immediately. It was so beautiful, coating the branches and trunks of the trees, turning them into crystal negative images of themselves. White fairy fingers of branches bowed to the ground with the weight of the snow.
Today it is turning to slush, leaving soggy grey footprints with every step taken, a gray-white day with an unsettling similarity to the sky and the ground. You don’t know where things begin and end when the world is coated white.
We now have a greeter at the door, stylish in his fir branch cape and antlers, waving his hockey stick hands at the bemused passers-by: 