White out

Brian Wilson

Like many people, my family typically spends a good chunk of time over the holiday season traveling to visit relatives.

Our typical journey is from Medford down south to visit my wife’s family in Racine. Kim doesn’t have a large family and about the only time we would see them all was at Christmas.

The last time I visited my family in New Jersey for Christmas was 17 years ago when we took Beth on a cross-country train ride when my wife was still pregnant with my now 16-year-old son, Alex. In recent years as family members have spread to Ohio, Texas and Hawaii we have taken to scheduling Zoom gift openings. This is just as chaotic and disorganized as you can imagine, with the first 10 minutes each year being devoted to once again explaining how Zoom works and that it is very important for people to mute their microphones and not swing their phones or other devices around to give the rest of us motion sickness.

Most years the journey to Racine is uneventful. We have dealt with our share of sloppy weather and vehicle issues, such as the year our power-window decided to freeze in the down position and we drove for about three hours with the window open and sleet coming through.

A few times our plans have been derailed by the weather such as the year we realized just in time that the driver on I39 in front of us was headed off the highway and into the ditch rather than following the curve of the road while driving in Waushara County, which is noteworthy for seeming to only have one plow to clear the interstate on every other Wednesday. For all I know this may have improved since that journey, and my apologies to any of the no-doubt hard working and dedicated member of their county’s road crews. In recent years we have rerouted to avoid that stretch of highway if there is even a chance of winter precipitation.

Another time, my children got a last minute hotel stay for their holiday adventure when we made the decision to stop about three-quarters from our destination because the blowing snow and decreasing visibility was making travel too risky to chance. It is amazing how much a difference having other people in the vehicle who you worry about makes in deciding if the roads are acceptable for travel.

Our plan last week was that I would head out from work on Friday afternoon, stop in Wausau for a doctor appointment for Kim and then hit the road from there. As plans go, it was a pretty good one and we had it all worked out. Jack Frost had different plans though. With forecasters predicting blizzard conditions and it being taken very serious by even the grizzled locals who were old when I came to the area three decades ago, we decided to alter our plans. We rescheduled the doctor’s visit and left Saturday morning instead.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I have been legitimately concerned for my personal safety. Once was when I was riding the elevated train late at night in Chicago and a panhandler was trying to convince me to leave the train with him at the next platform because he had something he wanted to show me.

Last Saturday’s drive was another such situation. We had been dealing with snow blowing steadily across the highway much of the trip, but this stayed near ground level and the roads were cold and dry enough that it wasn’t sticking. This changed as we drove by Oshkosh on Hwy 41 and began crossing Lake Butte des Morts.

Kim was driving at the time as we entered a wall of blowing whiteness where we could barely make out the tail lights of the cars in front of us. Those sorts of situations are always scarier from the passenger seat since you have no control at all are are frantically pumping the imaginary brake pedal. Fortunately, the people on the road were already driving cautiously and we managed to all slow down to a crawl as we crossed through the whiteout to the peak of the bridge only to plunge into it again while leaving the south end of the bridge.

The rest of our journey was fortunately uneventful, with the exception of me tripping on a rug at a gas station near Allenton and nearly tackling a nice older couple.

As I have gotten older, I have gained a greater appreciation that the best kind of snowstorm is the kind I can watch while peeking out of my window while enjoying a nice warm beverage.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.