This morning at the corner of Westwood and Ft Riley Blvd, a semi lay overturned on the corner. The tractor remained upright, but the trailer lay across the easement of the corner and on the property of the business there, a metal-polishing and landscaping business (when trying to figure out that combination, think mom-and-pop business) whose name I forget, but whose owners I know. Traffic buzzed by this wreck without the usual gawking that goes on at accident sites, perhaps because the police were already on hand, and the driver, although chagrinned, appeared to be uninjured. No other vehicles appeared to be involved. No fun, no excitement, but the sight of something so large -- especially in comparison to the small, old limestone building that houses the businesses there -- lying there overturned reminded me briefly of another time.

Farther down the road, at the hill on K-18 near Ogden that is known locally as "HiPo" hill (both the highway patrol and the local constabulary use the hill to run their radar eastward on K-18, sometimes parking their two cars driver's side to driver's side, like some kind of mating insects), the clouds overhead were high, bunched and quilted, perhaps building up behind a cold front that appears to have hit us. Snow clouds, I thought. And the memory nagged again.

It must have been Christmas 1977. My wife and I weren't yet married, but we lived together in Houston. She had returned to spend Christmas day with her family in Manhattan, while I stayed in Houston with my folks. Now I was on the way the day after Christmas (I think) to spend the week between Christmas and New Years with her and her family. I can place the year, because the car was new, a 1978 Buick Century that I'd bought in late October. One of the reasons I was going to Kansas was, of course, the attraction of my wife; however, I was also attracted by the fact that her brother had a stereo shop in Lawrence, and I had purchased the car without a radio (and they were AM/FM cassettes then, not "sound systems") hoping to buy a whoopass setup through him at a whoopass discount. The radio doesn't play a role in this meandering tale except to add the possibly inconsequential information that this was the first time I'd had the Buick on the road, and on this extended trip, without music, and without company, I thought that the seal on the windshield must have been defective because the noise of the wind was so loud, a possible defect in my newly purchased car that I had not noticed in the noisy traffic of Houston's crowded freeways.

It has been said of Kansas that the weather is the only landscape. Of course, that's not entirely true, but what truth there is to it could be applied to most of the countryside surrounding Interstate 35 from north of Dallas to Minneapolis. Oh, there are brief interruptions, such as the mighty Arbuckle Mountains in southern Oklahoma, and the rolling Flint Hills of my own region, but let's just rephrase that judgement about our landscape and say that the viewer must be attuned to a subtle form of beauty to appreciate a prairie. We are left with many minutes to notice the sky.

I had noticed in the last daylight north of Dallas that the clouds were very high, quilted, and apparently stalled over Oklahoma. I had started on my trip from Houston sometime in the middle of the afternoon, so by the time I got to Oklahoma City, darkness had fallen, and freezing rain had started to fall. Reluctant to drive over the icy roads in the dark, I registered at a Best Western on the north side of OKC, made a phone call to Manhattan, ate dinner alone in the motel restaurant, and returned to the room to watch some TV before going to sleep.

On the television I found Ohio State playing a bowl game. From that event, I could establish the date of this trip with certainty, because it was the bowl game in which a frustrated Coach Woody Hayes of Ohio State punched or pushed an opposing player who had made a play against his Buckeyes. But I don't think that I'll search for that today, if ever. The date of Hayes' demonstration of poor sportsmanship is not quite up there in my memory with the dates of the JFK assasination or the explosion of the Challenger.

The next morning, I woke early to resume the trip north. I discovered that the overnight storm had covered the car first with a layer of ice, and then with a few inches of snow. No one else was out and about in the parking lot yet, so because I was not equipped with an ice scraper (I was from Houston after all), I went to work on the ice with a pocket comb, eventually resorting to pouring hot water on the windshield to melt the ice away.

When I finally got underway about half an hour later, the snow was still falling, but somehow I believed then (as I probably do today) that the snow overlaying the ice on the roads provided better traction than the ice alone, so I regarded the snow as a stroke of luck considering the circumstances and I plunged foolishly on, northbound into the snow. About a mile from the motel, I stopped at the first gas station on I-35 that was open at that hour. I topped off the tank for the ballast, and got a discouraging road report from the attendant.

Not five minutes north of the gas station I came upon the first overturned semi of the day, followed within the next three miles by at least a dozen more huge, immobile dinosaurs trapped in a modern ice age.

The snow continued throughout the day, but I continued to drive, even slowing to 20 mph for major portions of the trip as road conditions and visibility required. I imagine my average speed for this leg of the journey (about 300 miles) was under 40 mph. But I arrived safely and without event, rejoined my mate, spent a week visiting her family, bought a stereo, returned to Houston with the windshield noises masked by tunes from the radio, and lived ever after, often happily.

What has this to do with anything? It's about quilted clouds, an overturned semi, a ride without radio, memory and its strange connections, and time, nothing more. But nothing less, either.

Today, the drive to work took about 25 minutes, the memory flashed by in an instant, and I took another 30 minutes to write about it.