26 January 2004

It is winter and I wondered what the hell I was doing, out on the road.

My motto in Washington is "If it's snowing, I ain't going." Yet here I was, snow crunching beneath my wheels, the front end of the Sebring seeking its own way through the packed snow. I had thought about this on the balcony, looking down at the snow and watching the drivers slide down the gentle grade of Route 50 below. Would anyone get up in the morning and say to themselves, "Well, better get going. If I am going to wreck the car today I had better get on it."

The first part of the trip was not optional and not fun. My pal was going back home. She didn't want to go and I didn't want her to. The weather had been looming on the radar for a more than a day. A big thick white band of trouble coming for us. "It's OK," I said. "The weather guys are almost always wrong. There are too many variables here for us to get hit hard. Mostly."

And I was being truthful. We were not having a bad winter, snow-wise, which is why people do not have the skills to in it. The big Chesapeake Bay moderates the worst of the weather and we are far more likely to get rain than snow in any given storm. But the circumstances were right for this one to stick it to us. There was most air from the south advancing into the teeth of the jet stream and it was headed northeast, not due east as it does normally. Plenty of moisture and plenty of cold. And it rolled right over us.

There was more moisture and more energy coming behind it. The six inches that we got Sunday night fell on cold ground and it was all still there. It had not melted on the pavement. It just lay there in the chill, too cold even for the chemicals and salt to have much effect on it. It was cold and gray but there was not much happening. The rain was not supposed to start until the afternoon.

We turned on the local news and watched the school closings. Most jurisdictions with any sense had thrown in the towel. I checked the Office of Personnel Management home-page and they had weaseled the situation, saying that the government was open, but with liberal unscheduled leave. That meant you could stay home if the roads concerned you, but you would be charged leave for the privilege. We checked the United Airlines homepage and they were playing it close to the vest. "Nothing cancelled yet" I observed cheerfully. I didn't want to worry her any more than she already was.

The smart thing to do would be to just go back to bed and work on other projects. But she had people and things counting on her back home, and the forecast suggested that the pause in precipitation made this morning the best chance to get out for the next few days. Then the phone rang.

It was more bad news. The nightshift down at the Homeland Security watch was still on duty and the dayshift could not get out of his neighborhood. I told the nightshift that I would get down there somehow and get him out of there. So there it was. We had to go twenty miles to the west to get to the airport and then I had a twenty-five mile slog back to the east to cross the frozen river and climb the District Heights to the campus on the summit of the bluff above the Potomac.

As much as we didn't want to, we piled things together and took the elevator to the first florr. We walked through the other unit with the dozens of accusing parts to the Murphy bed strewn around the floor. We went out the back door and onto the patio, where the dry snow had drifted on the walkway.

It was six inches, good and true. It was heaped on the car and I got snow all over myself opening the door. I leaned across the passenger's side and put the key in the ignition and started the engine. Then we brushed it off as best we could. A plow had been through the lot to poke a single travel lane through the snow. The bank was bumper-height. I got in the driver's seat and felt the snow sneak into the top of my dress shoes. I lowered the passenger's side window an inch or two with the button on my door. "Stand back," I said. "This is liable to be a little messy getting out."

It was.

I love the front-wheel drive on the convertible, though, and with the green "traction" light flashing, I crashed backward into the snow bank. I made it through on the second try.

We slipped and slid out of the parking lot and onto the residential street adjacent to Big Pink. There had been no plows here. There is a hierarchy and precedence to the plowing. Residential streets get no chemicals and are the last to see the plows. The main arteries get the first attention, then the feeder streets. The neighborhoods normally have to wait until the thaw.

We got up to Glebe Road and conditions got better. You could see pavement and I could hear the corrosive chemical bath washing the floorpan of the car. There were not many people on the road, though this was the heart of the normal rush hour. I-66 was clear, and that was the part I had feared. Cars were abandoned on the side of the road. We rolled smoothly out of Arlington County and into Fairfax and then arced off onto the Dulles Access Road. Despite the slush, this part of the journey was relatively smooth. Except for the emotional part.

We rolled up in front of the main terminal and said our good-byes under the soaring upswept arches.

It was awful. I did not want her to go, and wanted her to just get back in the car and come with me. She went in as I waited at the curb, engine running. Passing vehicles threw dark slush from their wheel-wells. There is something about the sweep of the roof, a swoosh of cheery architectural whimsy. She emerged from the terminal after a moment and confirmed that the airline still had a jaunty optimism about the morning, I hoped that was true, and that they were not just waiting to cancel later, after all the passengers had arrived.

She looked sadly at the car as I waved and picked my way around a shuttle bus, throwing a little rooster-tail of salt and wet. I retraced my way around the airport loop and back onto the Access Road toward town. I called the Watch and swore that I was coming to relieve them. The road was not better and no worse on the way back, but when I got off in Arlington to check the office e-mail and cancel my afternoon appointment on the other side of the Anacostia.

The main drag in Ballston is Fairfax Drive. It was a slushy mess. Arlington County seemed to be approaching this as a matter suitable for front-end loaders, and the board boulevard had a single travel lane hacked into it. Optimistic SUVs plowed along side, some of them under control. The ramp to the parking garage was plowed and the arms of the access barrier were locked in the "up" position to avoid having the die-hards drive through them. The first level of the garage was only a third filled. Normally, by nine o'clock, every slot is filled.

I went upstairs and most of the office doors were still locked. I hustled through the e-mail queue and cancelled the afternoon trip and puzzled over a summons from the Division Manager to travel west to Tyson's corner. I hastily typed that I had already traveled nearly fifty miles in the slush and had to get downtown to relive the watch for the guy who could not get out of his neighborhood, that I would be avaialbe on the cell phone in the meantime, though they made me lock it up at the Homeland Security Center, and I would check in as I could.

The trip from the office down to Wilson Boulevard was an adventure. I called my pal who was waiting at the airport. She said that there was no one there except the maintenance crews, and that although there was a jet sitting at the jetway, it looked forlorn and snow-covered. I wondered if I would be heading back to Dulles in a few hours, assuming that the maroon jeep driving the wrong way on the one-way street didn't clip me, or the wildly careening white sedan did not impact my door.

If there had been more of these idiots on the road I would not have made it. But I was at the desk, on watch, in forty minutes, not a bad trip at all. It took a half hour to get through security, but that was not attributable to anything except incompetence.

I like that front-wheel drive.

The oncoming shift showed up four hours late, and I smiled cheerfully as he set me free to drive back out to Tyson's Corner. So, back down the hill from District Heights, through the drifts on Canal Road, across the Key Bridge and into the slush at Rosslyn. I gunned the Sebring it to keep moving up the hill toward the Café Asia. I needed all the momentum I could to get to the top of the hill. I watched in amazement as a black Subaru attempted to back down into the travel lane through a mound of snow.

If I lost any speed I was going to be with him, stuck, and so I pressed the accelerator like grim death, swerving around him and waved vigorously at the pedestrian who was walking into the intersection, concentrating only on the misery of his cold, wet feet.

Only thirty miles to go in this incarnation of the winter wonderland. What the hell was I thinking? Why didn't I just say "no" and stay home?

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra