Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, rain pummeled San Francisco. The water cascaded down hills, power outages darkened the city, umbrellas broke and trees almost did. The rain in the city turned to snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A winter storm warning went into effect through Sunday evening: blizzard like conditions, stay off the road. Depending on the elevation and location, anywhere from 3 to 6 feet of snow had fallen in the Lake Tahoe area. Another foot was expected on Saturday night.
At 8pm on Saturday night, several hours after Interstate 80 re-opened, I ate a pound of roasted brussels sprouts, lightly salted, and got in the passenger seat of Josie’s Grand Cherokee to start what in good weather is a 3-4 hour journey to Tahoe. Our plan was to stop short of the foothills, or stop when the snow became too heavy. We promised loved ones we would be smart, and we would have been if not for Elena. While others had bailed on the trip because of the storm, Elena had rented a monstrous Chevy Blazer. She threw four just-in-case snow chains into the trunk and led our two-car caravan into the white out.
By the time we hit 2,000 feet, we were driving head-on into a snowflake fusillade. It was disorienting, like trying to see in the pitch-black while being doused with confetti. Then there was the fallen snow, piles of it, and it was this that demarcated the highway. The road snow was so fresh and deep, you could hear the tires crunch down on it. The numerous plows we passed could not keep up. I called Elena and told her that Josie and I would be pulling off the road to find a motel. “What?” Elena said, naturally cheery. “Why would you do that?” I mentioned some stuff about not wanting to die. “This is what you do,” she said. “You drive slow, fall into a line and follow the red lights. The banks are too high, you can’t fly off a cliff. I’m not going to lie. It’s much further. But we’ll get there.”
Her soothing words carried us at 25 mph the next 1,000 vertical feet. And by then it was too late for a different course of action. The unlit, unplowed off-ramps looked more dangerous than the road.
The brussels sprouts in my stomach weren’t sitting too well. My hands shook too much to select music. I couldn’t concentrate on playing a game. Josie hunched forward, bent her head and tried to find a square of vision through the icy windshield. Occasionally, she would open the window, time a quick break between the wipers and use her left hand to grab a piece of ice from the windshield.
“Can you see?” I asked. “Because I can’t see. Do you want me to do anything with the defroster?” I asked. “Are you tired?” I asked. “How are you feeling? Are you doing okay? I prefer it when you go slower. Keep a large braking distance. Two hands on the wheel. Always. Really, you can see? Stop checking your phone. Should I call road conditions again. 25, that’s good, that makes me happy. Maybe we should stop. We can sleep in the car. Remember, we promised our loved ones we wouldn’t do anything crazy.”
Josie doesn’t hear very well. She couldn’t hear the number of times I asked if she could see. Following everything she pseudo-heard, she said, “What?” and looked at my lips. This prompted me to repeatedly say, “Eyes on the road,” and eventually I gave up on conversation altogether.
We passed car after SUV after car, immobile on the side of what appeared to be the road, headlights on, wheels spinning in the snow. Should this happen to us, I imagined we’d sleep in the car. At midnight, close to the 7,085 foot mountain pass, we were forced to a complete stop. Highway closed. People took this opportunity to step outside their vehicles and relieve themselves or stretch their legs. Some were wearing t-shirts and sneakers, others hats and jeans. I’m not sure what I expected, some sign of a death-wish across the forehead, or a visible, irrefutable reason to be on the road blazing in the eyes, but everyone I saw looked hum-drum regular.
Yet, everyone around me was nuts. I’m comfortable with neurotic nuts, people like Woody Allen, Seinfeld, Ellen, people like me, people whose crazy is best kept in check by a city. But stuck on Donner Pass at midnight in the middle of a blizzard, I realized I had a different kind of crazy in me. The kind of crazy willing to leave safety and reason behind in search of perfect powder.
I’d been around this type of wacko before. A few years ago, I spent the winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Guys self-dubbed the dawn patrol would walk through my living room at 6 a.m, rousting my roommate to wait in line a couple hours before the mountain opened to ride “first tram.” I had friends who hiked into the back country in questionable conditions, and one who found himself lost and alone, waist-deep in a canyon. People died in avalanches; someone always does. That winter, I’d considered myself a cautious visitor to such a lifestyle, thankful for my freshies, but not willing to fight Mother Nature for the rights to her property.
I met people in Jackson who wanted little more in life than to carve tight lines through trees and leave open faces with their territorial tracks. I met people who followed the weather radar like those around me now are following the presidential primaries. I didn’t notice it at the time, but that powder lust, the obsession, it got into my blood. The spray of a face shot, the float of a turn, those memories stayed with me like opportunistic viruses awaiting a storm. I never planned to be like this, but my body understood why people go to such great lengths to find an untouched snow field.
I would’ve gotten off the road if I were on my own or I never would’ve started to begin with, and although I didn’t enjoy one second of the 6 hour driving adventure, if I was honest with myself, I was mostly thankful that someone crazier than me, like Josie, was willing to drive, and that someone like Elena, even crazier than both of us, was willing to lead.
An accident was cleared, and the road opened again, and shortly thereafter, I stopped looking through my small square of visibility in the windshield. I didn’t need to see because I wasn’t driving.
Josie and Elena drove us on and on and on. There are many places to stay near the ski mountains of Tahoe, but we drove across the goddamn Nevada State line for a free place to stay in Incline Village. We never made it up the hill to the house. The unplowed road was too steep, and after several attempts up and much out-of-control tobogganing back down, we found a motel. It was 2 a.m. Adrenaline was too high for sleep and poor Josie kept waking herself up to focus her eyes on the road.
The next two days of riding were some of the sickest of my life. There was so much snow, more snow than I’ve ever had for myself inbounds on a mountain. I went so hard and my muscles, my quads and my calves, are so tight I can barely walk now, days later. I’m still not sure if that drive was worth it, if it is worth it to make poor decisions that sometimes result in amazing experiences. But I’m almost positive I would do it again.
