30 Life Lessons - Rock Salt and Windshield Wipers
- Douglas McCall
- Oct 22, 2024
- 4 min read
The task was simple. Drive three and half hours north to Potsdam, pick up Steph after an event in the music building at Crane (SUNY Potsdam), and drive her back home. It was a seven-hour round trip that I had done many times. Surely, this time would be no different. I could not have been more wrong.
The event Steph had to attend ended somewhere around nine, so we left between five and six. Plenty of time, or so we thought. The trek from Syracuse is fairly straightforward. Drive for a while up Interstate 81, hang a right north of Watertown, and ride St. Rt. 11 to Potsdam. Unfortunately, between Syracuse and Potsdam lies a patch of land called the Tug Hill Plateau—this area of New York on the eastern tip of Lake Ontario. I am not a meteorologist, but I know that because of weather patterns and lake-effect snow, this can be pretty treacherous during the winter. It can also be unpredictable.
It was not snowing in Syracuse. The weather seemed quite promising. This was also before the advent of the Accuweather app, so I could not see what awaited me on this northward journey. John and I got in the car, and off we went. It was wintertime, so even at our early departure at five, it was already getting dark.
John wrote an epic poem regaling one of our northern escapades (for we had done many, and they were fraught with challenges on more than one occasion). I will endeavor not to repeat his words. As we drove north, engaged in lively conversation, the time passed effortlessly, and before we knew it, we were approaching the Tug Hill. We were so engrossed in conversation that we might not have noticed where we were had I not begun to see white flakes hitting the windshield. It was starting to snow. And these were not just little flakes. They were massive wet snowflakes indicative of lake-effect snow!
As can happen in the Tug Hill, the weather changed almost instantly. Where we had been cruising along at 60 mph, we were now traveling 20 mph. Clear skies had given way to 15-foot visibility. As luck would have it (at least I think it was lucky), we ended up behind a snow plow. Granted, we were traveling even slower, but we knew the road ahead was being cleared. We figured we would stay here until the weather broke and all would be well. We were very wrong!
The windshield wipers were working overtime, trying to keep the windshield clear. Ice built up on them, decreasing their effectiveness with each passing wipe. Then, inexplicably, there was an unfamiliar noise, and suddenly, the driver-side wiper was gone! It had flown off the arm on the last pass. What little good the wiper had been doing ended, and seeing out the windshield became much more challenging.
John reacted quickly, perhaps too quickly. He rolled down his window, snowbrush in hand, and attempted to clear the windshield by reaching across the passenger side with the snow brush. Remember that we were behind a snow plow traveling at 15-20 mph, and snow plows don’t just clear snow. They distribute salt on the roads.
The technical term for the salt used on highways is rock salt, aptly named because the crystals are the size of small pebbles. When traveling at 20 mph, they hit your vehicle with a fair amount of force. When John reached out the window to clear the windshield, he left a portion of his arm exposed to both the cold temperature and the small pebbles traveling at 20 mph (I am sure there is an appropriate math problem to calculate their actual speed accurately). It was a painful and unpleasant experience for John, and he couldn’t effectively reach my side of the windshield, no matter how good his intentions were.
The solution ended up being me with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand out the window, clearing the windshield. It seemed like hours that we were behind that snow plow. The tug hill is only 20 or 30 miles on 81, but at 10-20 mph, a 20-minute drive takes more than an hour. As we approached Watertown, the weather began to clear some, but we were still short a windshield wiper.
The 3.5-hour escapade ended up taking nearly six hours. Instead of an arrival time of 9 pm, it was after 11 pm when we finally arrived in Potsdam. This would not have been an issue had Steph been sitting in her dorm room. However, we planned to pick her up at the music school, which closed at 10 pm, before everyone carried cell phones. The only way to call in or out of the music building was at one of the pay phones, and the custodians kicked Steph out of the building. We could not call her anyway; we were driving without a cell phone.
There were many more pieces of that journey; perhaps I will tell them about them later. I learned from this particular experience to plan for the weather. I joked with John about his insistence on carrying many emergency items in his car. Perhaps this would have ended differently if we had a set of emergency wipers in the car. I also learned that it is essential to check in occasionally. Once we cleared the Tug Hill, we could have stopped at a payphone and called campus safety to get a message to Steph, but I was so hyper-focused on getting to Potsdam that I didn’t think to make that call. While the destination is important, so is keeping others informed. Sometimes, you must remember to get out of your head and consider the folks around you.
Be well!
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