Just Stay Home

Not a road that I would want to drive on. Photo by Egor Kamelev.

(Whenever possible? Just stay home. I think that might be my new winter mantra.)

I have reached a point in my life when I generally do not have to drive in a snowstorm if I do not want to. True, if it’s during a busy work season, I might have to make phone calls and cancel massage appointments. This is not completely harmless; my bank account doesn’t love it when I give up work. But I am learning that it is better for me to lose a little income than to spend the day worrying about the weather, obsessively checking the app on my phone which gives road conditions, wondering (if I have gone to town) if I will be able to make it home before chain controls go on or the freeway closes or the road becomes impassable. Also? The freeway is only a small part of my driving stress. The rest of my commute entails getting from the freeway to my house, which means traversing another mile of narrow road down hills that are not so steep in the summer when the weather is clear but become treacherous when the road is snowy and icy.

I’ve spent too much time over the years worrying about the weather, especially when I worked as a massage therapist at a spa at a Utah ski resort when my children were little. It was quite a drive, about 45 minutes from my home even in good weather. I had to go from my house down a hill to the freeway then off the freeway and up a canyon road before finally turning onto a little road that ran alongside a creek and climbed to the ski resort. I remember one frosty Sunday morning driving to work, inching along, when I was passed by two cars, both of which immediately skidded, turned around and around in the middle of the road, and barreled onto the shoulder toward the river. I crept passed them and made it to work safely.

Another time, I made the mistake of driving our little Geo Prism to work because of its fantastic gas mileage, instead of our trusty AWD car. It was clear in the morning but blizzardy in the afternoon. I was inching down the resort hill heading home just after dark when I hit a patch of ice. I watched helplessly as my little car slowly left the main road and skidded toward the creek below. There was nothing I could do but hold on. Thankfully, it stopped before I was in any danger, but it scared me. There was no way I was going to drive that car one more inch that night, so I sat there, waiting. Finally, another employee came by; he managed to back my car up and drove it up the hill to the main parking lot. I caught a ride home with one of my coworkers who had her Subaru. The next day, my husband came with me to pick up the car and bring it home. It was awhile before I was able to drive in the snow again.

Those experiences have stayed with me. I clearly have a little residual snow driving trauma.

It’s hard, because often the storms do not materialize like the forecasters predict. They said there would be measurable snow here earlier this week, with snow accumulating even below my home. I cancelled appointments and stayed home. In the end, it only rained. So I could have worked. I should have worked! The self-recrimination begins: “You are such a baby! You even have a sturdy AWD vehicle, yet you are afraid to go out in any kind of weather. Wimpy whiner you are.”

But is that true? Sure, nothing happened that was alarming from that storm. It wasn’t a wasted day at home, though. I did some bookkeeping. I scheduled some overdue medical appointments. I worked on other writing. I worried a lot less. I took care of myself.

Sometimes I am a little envious of people who live safely below the snow line, who never have to think about the climate that is only a few miles up the freeway, but that never affects them in the way it affects me. Except I truly love where I live. I love my neighbors. I love my blackberry bushes, even if I am trying to eliminate them. I don’t even hate the ice and snow! I just don’t like that I have to make decisions about work when the storms blow in. The trick, I think, will be to stay home when I feel like I need to. To not judge myself if the storm doesn’t materialize. To keep learning to give myself grace.

(If you want to see some scary pictures of people having weather related driving mishaps, follow the CHP Truckee Instagram account. It will make you want to stay off the road during winter storms, too.)