The snow was supposed to come down Christmas Eve in New Jersey and the rest of the northeast. That would have meant some treacherous driving getting to my mom's house off exit 90 of the Connecticut Turnpike, but it would be the first northeastern white Christmas since 1969. As it was, the skies were dry Christmas Eve. My brother Jeff and his girlfriend Cindy squeezed their presents in my trunk with mine in Fort Lee, and we made good time crossing Connecticut (except for the hour scrambling for last minute gifts at the mall).
Christmas morning Dad got up early to make waffles, and he saw a dusting of snow. Then the rain came, and erased all presence of the snow. A technical white Christmas, even if everyone who got up past 7:00 never saw it. The rain got heavier through the day, and the wind increased. By noon Mom's house looked like it was in a car wash. Lightning and thunder came during Christmas dinner.
Christmas on a Wednesday leads to pain in the butt prospects like working on Thursday the 26th. Jeff, Cindy and I left around 4:00 to drive home. Dad and my other brother Brendan were also leaving, in Dad's Jeep Cherokee. We were all going back to New Jersey, so we'd both be taking the Connecticut Turnpike.
The rain wasn't fun to drive in, but was manageable. We had half an hour of daylight driving, although with the rain and wind the headlights became more of a necessity than a politeness. This was a long boring drive, and I usually do it as fast as possible, to minimize the 'long' portion of it. I was only doing 60 now, and didn't feel completely confident in doing that.
Around New Haven (exit 43) the rain switched to snow. The wind continued, visibility decreased, and I slowed from 60 to 50.
It used to be once a month I felt that a cell phone would be a really useful tool. As more and more people got them, more opportunities for their usefulness arose. It was currently as every other day I realized how useful one would be, and the holdout before I join the wireless world won't be long now. Fortunately, Cindy, Dad and Brendan currently have them, so today I had all the benefits of the phone without that ugly bill. Brendan called Cindy's cell phone and asked for a weather forecast. The Jeep's radio wasn't working. We switched on 1010 WNYS.
The entire metro New York area was snowblind. The further west you went, the more snow you got. The Long Island Expressway was a sheet of ice. Albany had about two feet. Cars were spinning out, cars were flipping over. Airports were closing. I slowed from 50 to 40.
The white line dividers were invisible in the snow, and I had to go by the reflective nature of the paint off my headlights as my only guide. The road's previous line dividers (a foot or two to either the left or right) were painted over, but still reflective, so finding the lane became a multiple choice quiz. Traffic was light enough so you couldn't go by anyone else's example, and heavy enough so moving a couple feet left or right could mean a collision.
The proper way to drive is with your hands at 10 and 2. Normally I drive with a thumb at 5:30. Right now I was rigidly at 10 and 2. If my grip on the wheel were any tighter, I'd be ripping it off. The heat had been on a while, and after two hours of hot blasting at me in a long coat, sweater and T-shirt, I was melting. But removing the coat was like getting out a straight jacket, and that would mean a tidy death for the entire car. Even giving the heat controls a glance would be enough to get in a crash. I continued on, sweating.
We passed Norwalk (exits 14-16), where Jeff lived for a year or so. "If you still lived there, I'd be pulling over to spend the night," I said. 1010 WNYS was giving the usual storm speech about getting off the roads unless it was an emergency. Normally I'm ten minutes from home and this gets ignored. Right now I was two hours from home, and that time grew as the snow blew. Plus I was down to 30, and slowing.
Jeff was planning, once we reached Fort Lee, to get in his office with Cindy and spend the night there. It was better than driving home. I had sleeping bags in the car, so maybe I'd join him. But Fort Lee was still hours away, and there was a good chance we wouldn't make it there intact.
It was quickly agreed upon to get a hotel for the night. We all had work the next morning, but we were already packed for an overnight trip, and Jeff and I work right on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Cindy was out of luck since her work was in Morristown, but she'd be more so if we flipped over in a ditch. Jeff spotted a Budget Inn from the highway, and I took the closest off-ramp (exit 8), into downtown Stamford.
A Marriott was at the foot of the off ramp, in the middle of the city. The Budget Inn was down the street. I stayed at a Marriott in downtown Chicago last May. Close to 250 bucks a night. Work was paying then. I continued on to the Budget, full aware of how stupid I'd feel if I crashed after passing up the high-ticket hotel.
Irony had the day off, so we got to the Budget Inn fine. Six stories of squat squareness. I pulled into the deserted front lot, and we checked to see if there was any room at the Inn. Stamford's not exactly a resort town, so we had no problems getting a room with two beds. Split three ways, the room was under $30 a person, well worth it.
We weren't allowed to park in the front lot for some reason, so we had to move to the covered guest lot (which avoided a lot of digging out the next morning, come to think of it). I got on the street, an unplowed downhill four car-widths wide with parked cars and snow covering two and a half of those widths. I dared to ride my brake down forty feet of it, and missed the guest lot completely. It was a tiny slot between two parked cars. I made the next right, into another covered lot, but it was full of snowplows and delivery trucks and other industrial company. Presumably I couldn't park here as well. I headed back up to the guest lot.
The road looked like a bobsled track, with just as much traction. I only had two car lengths to travel up, but the car was just spinning its wheels. If the spinning led to rotation of just a few degrees in either direction, I'd ding a parked car. I was playing Operation with the gas pedal. I stopping the spinning, was relieved to find my car wasn't sliding downhill at all, and asked Jeff and Cindy to dig the snow out from under my tires. They cleared it in fifteen seconds, and I managed to lunge the car up and into the guest lot. Putting the car in park and walking away was a pleasure. I had pounds of snow lodged in each wheel well.
The empty Budget Inn might have felt like the Overlook, if it hasn't been converted from an office building. As it was, hallways were small and cramped, and half the doors led to supply closets. Ice machines were only every other floor (not that frozen water was a rare commodity right now). There were no vending machines, only the front desk clerk with a rack of candy bars behind him. (He was nice enough to give Cindy some free Advil from a first aid kit when she asked to buy some.)
The room was as standard as they come. The bathroom, in keeping with being a standard hotel room, had a horrendously placed mirror. It was opposite the toilet, giving anyone standing to pee a urinal's-eye-view of the proceedings. "That mirror was a little too personal," Jeff said.
I called Mom from the room with Cindy's cell, bypassing the ridiculous hotel phone charge, and she thanks us eighteen times for pulling over. Brendan and Dad were soldiering on, she said. They had four-wheel drive, but I was hoping they'd pull over just the same.
Our hotel window faced the highway, and we could see just a few cars going very slowly on it. Four stories beneath us were Jeff and Cindy's footprints from clearing snow from my tires, and were virtually covered in the course of an hour. Wind howled and shook trees.
Christmas Day always ends abruptly after Christmas dinner. The rest of the afternoon and night is spent fiddling with various gifts you've gotten, being surprised by the non-holiday content on TV, and then watching that non-holiday content. Therefore I had no traditions to uphold, and spending an unexpected night in a hotel was a neat novelty.
I was also not surprised to find Ocean's 11 on HBO at 9:00. I was talking about renting this with Jeff and Cindy just last week, after a shopping trip to BJ's. They had both already seen it, though, so I rented Goldmember. Now I'd get to see it tonight.
I called Brendan's cell phone at 8:30. The Jeep was on the Cross Bronx Expressway (my favorite oxymoron), going 15 miles per hour. The four-wheel drive was preventing them from skidding, but they were still snowblind, and moving at the speed of the slowest car on the road. And they had no radio. "You really made the right choice," Brendan said, a little envy in his voice.
The only restaurant within sight was a Taco Bell right next to the hotel. No one was starving, but Christmas dinner was at 2:00 and it was 8:30 now. We bundled up, trundled outside, and stumbled through an obstacle course of buried concrete curbs. The lights were on inside the Taco Bell, but an untouched sheet of snow led to the door. The Taco Bell was closed all Christmas day. Feliz Navidad.
Any food we'd be eating would come from my car. I had an emergency package of cookies in the front console, along with two fortune cookies so old I don't remember putting them in. In the trunk were our Christmas gifts, 100% nonedible. Also in the trunk were a couple items from the BJ's trip: 24 Little Debbie brownies and two giant jars of peanut butter. (There were also twenty cans of tuna and a half-gallon of Prego, but we weren't THAT desperate for food.) The brownies worked well for dipping into the peanut butter. Not the worst meal I've ever had. Hell, it was better than the chicken sandwich I had Monday night.
HBO came in terribly thanks to the weather. Audio was OK, but the picture was 85% distorted signals. No Ocean's 11 for me. The rest of the cable spectrum came in fine, so we flipped around until we found Trading Spaces. I'd never seen that show before, but heard people raving about it. Interior decorators remodel rooms of people's houses and then surprise the owners with them. It was OK, for something didn't involve casino heists.
At 9:30, Brendan and Dad were finally off the Cross Bronx and on the New Jersey Turnpike, which was plowed and clear. One hill on the Cross Bronx had six inches of snow on it, and had never met a snowplow. It was shrugging off cars like a linebacker playing against kindergartners. The Jeep made it up there fine, but my Camry never would have. It took them four hours from Stamford to make it home.
The heat in the hotel room was pumping out, just like in the car. Unlike in the car, there was no death penalty for getting comfortable. I watched Trading Spaces in a T-shirt.
The snow stopped during the night. Four to six inches, it looked like. Traffic was moving fast on the highway, like it was just another day. We hit the continental breakfast off the lobby and checked out.
We pulled the car out of the hotel lot, and the hellish little road I was on had still not been plowed. I went down the hill; I'd rather not have to do that uphill scramble again if I had to. Down led to a dead end, so I did have to do that uphill. I picked the next road over, which was if anything even smaller with even more snow. But another game of Operation successfully played. Irony had a long Christmas vacation.
The highways were clear, with the occasional abandoned car in the shoulder. The trees looked like they had been dunked in yogurt. Exit signs were completely plastered with slirt (Jeff's word for a mixture of slush and dirt). One just had the number 5 visible. The HOSPITAL sign only read SPIT.
The Cross Bronx, for once in its life, was clear, and the George Washington was fine. Jeff's and Cindy's cars were absolutely buried. They were in a covered lot, but the wind pushed the snow under roofs. At least their cars were their original color: mine had turned from black to rock salt gray.
There were only a few people at work this day. I sought them all out. I had a Christmas story to tell them.