With climate change and no snow in Mn., this may be my last drive in white

The silent sentry deceptively contrasts against the cold winter sky.

A Minnesota winter is both a threat and a reward. 

“The beast is loose and kills tonight…”

Two popular songs portray winter with contrary emotions. The Russian band, Krokus, leads into terror: Russian winter, broken hearts/Cold winds in the dark/The beast is loose and kills tonight/Full moon burning bright. Run for your life/Run for your life/Run for your life/Run for your life. The much-overused “Jingle Bells” invites a joyful sleigh ride to a family dinner. I have combined touches of both themes in describing my 200 mile car ride home in the depths of a Minnesota winter.

December 2007: one of the worst Minnesota winter storms with gales and snowfalls of more than 20 inches. As my daughter, Ariel, and I drove in our Subaru to our northern Minnesota home 200 miles to the north, we faced weather warnings that should have convinced us to cancel the trip. The drive was scripted out of a Hogwarts initiation rite of passage for the apprentice wizards. We were leaving St. Paul headed toward a foreign, challenging world.

That day there were nearly a thousand reported accidents and a dozen plus deaths statewide. We saw cars stranded, crashed, rolled over with tires trying to find traction in the air above. Ambulances roamed around us with sirens moaning like cows lost in the snowbanks. The winter’s peculiar optics engaged us with snow tornados, sending their white forms without shadows at our windshield. Driving into the night, the winds exceeded 50 miles per hour which propelled our car into a vicious world of mysterious energy.

Large bulwarks of snow appeared on the road like icy crocodiles whose noses pushed out from the edges of the fields. We had to swerve to miss the sepulcher bodies or we would have flipped into the ditch. These snow amphibians blew across the road with a fantastical sense of power and threat.

Our vision stretched outward to fields covered with ribbons of fog and clumps of blowing snow.

Agitated  trees stood like camouflaged soldiers in a white swamp. The trunks were invisible; just the swaying tops of the trees were visible. It looked like lower limbs and tops of trees were moving toward us in the pockets of the storm. I felt as if I was in Elsinore at the overture of a tragedy. Would we get out of here alive?

The skidding traffic magnified the threats to our lives.

Vehicles would come up quickly behind us with their blinding lights, then hit the brakes, and suddenly dovetail across the road to pass. In the most frightening case, a snowmobile headed directly toward us with a shaking light that obscured my vision. Because of the snow flurries, I could only make out a bright object that frightened me with its apocalyptic threatening eye heading toward our car. The light suddenly swerved into the far lane. Startled, I braked and he stopped his threatening snow machine. He paused to stare at me. Then we passed by each other in the night.

My daughter and I arrived safely, though exhausted, at our home. It is just three hours away from the Cities at regular speeds. It took over six hours to reach our destination. Anna, wife and mother, was predictably relieved to see us appear out of the dark.

The next day was the total Minnesota weather denial that there had been any storm the night before. The sun rose in a clear sky and snow covered the ground like a well-made bed. Lack of any wind gave us the opportunity to fly in a Cessna Cherokee 4-seater over a fairytale landscape. Now we know what it means to enter rapture after the storm!

My daughter and I modified the popular song by Joni Mitchell to end our journey:

“We’ve looked at snow from both sides now, From up and down and still somehow
It’s snow’s illusions, we recall. We really don’t know snow at all.”

“Oh, what fun it is to ride….”

Profile photo of Richard C. Kagan
Richard C. Kagan

Every day is a snow day

Reader Advisory.  Iron Butterfly’s“In-A-Gada-Da-Vida,” and Simon and Garfunkel are referenced in this piece. If an earworm ensues, counteract it by singing “Bingo” (you know, “there was a boy who had a little dog and Bingo was his name-o…”)

Snow days

During grade school snow days, Chicky Ross, Danny Corsi, Tommy DiPetro and I used to sled until we were frozen stiff.  We didn’t know our clothes were soaked and frozen until we got next to the coal furnace in the basement, started steaming, our pants came off as a slab of ice and our legs were maraschino red.  We flashed down Beech Street’s steep quarter mile hill.  For an easy stop, we’d make a  sharp left at the bottom slow gliding to a stop on Maple Street, or make a sharp right onto Elm for one last lazy dip.  OR, for the sledding Samurai, we’d fly straight off the bottom of Beech ten feet into the air, then Slam! onto Ray Lakavich’s yard and plunge to a brush bordered creek. The Lakavich option’s mystique was enhanced by the likelihood of pursuit by irate Ray who didn’t want “goddamn kids diggin’ up” his “fucking yard.” Today’s salacious film scripts are drafted on the lawns of America.

High school snow days were spent lounging around the electric heater in Bill Menda’s attic reading Agatha Christie and listening to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (baby) or Eric Burden and the Animals wail “We gotta get out of this place.” (NYT, Jan 29, 2024, “Today’s Teenagers: Anxious About Their Futures and Disillusioned by Politicians”. Really.) Or, if I was yearning from a surfeit of Simon and Garfunkel, I took long walks through snowy woods with my dog, Ginger, dreaming (me, not Ginger) of Henry Mancini’s second cousin (see my reply to Jim’s comment on my DMV post) and planning to be the next JD Salinger.

Okay I’m gonna pull up, now, before I (as a friend warns) “drive into a ditch on Memory Lane,” because, the real point of this essay is now, as a retired Boomer, to my delight, every day is a snow day.

These days, when people ask me what I have scheduled, I reply, “nothing,” that magic word, which makes time not only relative, but optional.

Look, daffodils blooming.  A perfect snow day.