As the mother of three adult children with serious pre-existing medical conditions—one case of cancer and two of Crohn’s disease—I’d like to add my voice to the current health care debate. After years of emergency room visits, consults, surgeries and medications, all are currently doing well. But the need for continuous and decent health insurance coverage perilously hangs like the Sword of Damocles over their futures.
So while Republicans and Tea Partiers cheerfully roll up their sleeves and dig in on their campaign promises to dismantle health care reform and let free market competition dictate the best values to be had for “health care consumers,” I’d like to point out that that basic term recasts reality for ideological convenience.
In the difficult world of trying to provide our families with decent medical coverage in this dire economy and job outlook, we shouldn’t be categorized as health care “consumers.” Health care “victims” is more like it. “Hostages,” at the very least.
Calling us simply “consumers” in this minefield of co-pays and deductibles and coverage limits and employer contributions implies some sort of sharp-eyed and dispassionate retail adventure akin to buying a refrigerator. Or perhaps a recliner sofa. An exercise in comparative shopping that puts the consumer in the driver’s seat, ready to walk out the door and take his money to the next store or provider if the deal being offered isn’t sweet enough. Under those conditions, yes, you’re likely to get a better price on that refrigerator or sofa. It’s the nature of the free market.
But “comparative shopping” for health insurance coverage for your family is entirely different game, and one with deadly stakes. Not only are you betting on trying to provide good medical care and cost coverage for yourself or those you love in light of unforeseeable catastrophic events in the future, you are blindly investing in trust. Trust that valid claims and reasonable medications will not be denied or delayed beyond their usefulness; trust that your doctors will be able to give you the proper medical treatment for your problems without a bean counter looking over their shoulders and casting a chill on their decision-making; trust that you and your family will be taken care of with compassion and wisdom and won’t be forced into bankruptcy at the end of the crisis.
If you buy a refrigerator and it doesn’t work, you have the option of having the store either take it back or fix it for you while live on peanut butter sandwiches or go out to eat. If the recliner sofa you bought as cheaply as possible after visiting a half dozen furniture stores has a defective reclining mechanism, neither your health nor your home nor your family nor your life’s savings are at risk while you find a replacement or demand a refund. But if the insurance company you have thoughtfully chosen on a sunny day in the free market from several slickly-packaged options elects to deny coverage for a transplant, or a course of treatment, at exactly the moment when it is most needed, you are helpless. A life may hang in the balance, hooked up to monitors and IV bags and catheters, and yet you are virtually powerless. The idea of exercising your power and right as a consumer to take your business elsewhere right then is a grotesque joke.
Years ago, I remember talking about health insurance with a “soccer dad” whose son was on the same team as mine. As we stood on the practice sidelines, he vented about his situation. His wife was the primary breadwinner, and she was seriously ill. There was a large deductible involved, as I recall, and under whatever rules of engagement applied, he was somehow precluded from choosing a cheaper radiological test provider. He was angry, and frustrated, and railed at the unfairness of not being able to better comparison shop for a cheaper result.
I felt stunned, like I had gone through the looking glass. Why, I thought, at this time of horrible stress and family crisis, should shopping for medical tests be his concern as though he was pricing tomatos? All logic and compassion dictated that at this particular time, his primary job should have been to reassure his young children that their world wouldn't end and to take care of his wife while the medical professionals did their jobs. And yet here he was, fixating on scrambling for dollars instead.
Given the position and vulnerability of the “consumer” in the vast food chain that makes up the health care system and health insurance funding, this is an area of our lives that absolutely cries out for governmental involvement and protection to guarantee the health and safety of its citizens. I slept easier for a short time after “Obamacare” was passed, knowing that my children could not be denied insurance coverage because of their prior health problems.
Now, with a new face on Congress intent on repealing those improvements, the sleepless nights begin again.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Thrillered
I finally came up with a sentence in the English language scarier to my children than the “your Mom’s going on Spring Break” line was a few years ago. And those words would be …
“Your mother is on YouTube…” (pause for effect, note the holding of breath at this unforeseen announcement, the slight brow crinkle, the arch of one eyebrow slowly rising upwards in disbelief)
…"dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.”
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! With four kids to inform individually after the fact, trust me, I got all the mileage I possibly could in the maternal embarrassment department.
And doesn’t it feel just wonderful when that happens? A cosmic turning of the tables, a reaffirmation that you can still surprise them. Just when they thought—after the passage of the junior high and high school years—that you were okay to be around again, cue the theme music from “Jaws.” Gotcha!
I could write a thousand words or more about the look on my eighth grade daughter’s face when I showed up at the door of her classroom bearing Halloween cupcakes…and dressed like Pocahontas. Oh wait a minute, I did that already. But this was so much better.
Not that it was intentional to start with. I had been oblivious to the entire thing until I was sitting in my office one day, across the desk from a defendant and her attorney, ready to engage in what’s called the “pretrial conference” part of the case. I leaned forward politely and expectantly, thinking we would start talking about crime and punishment and alibis and mitigating circumstances, when he looked at me with an air of bemusement.
“Didn’t I just see you on television this weekend? In a park, in a really big group of people … dancing to Michael Jackson?”
I was BUSTED!!!!!!!
It was hard to keep a straight face after that for the rest of our official tête à tête.
As usual, when I’m engaging in silliness or risk of epic proportions, there’s a certain man that I hold dear who has his hand extended, saying “Let’s!”
This would be the same guy who has been responsible for my being on the back of a Harley flying down the interstate surrounded by a hundred other bikers coursing like blood through an artery, hanging on with one arm around his waist while I snapped pictures over his shoulder with the other. Or strolling around the grounds of a Renaissance Faire decked out in a lace-up bodice, long skirt and cleavage while he accompanied me in tights, period boots and a leather vest. Or cutting concrete pavers with a chop saw off the back of a Ford F-150. There’s rarely been a dull moment.
So when my friend Mary Kay announced that as part of a park promotion she was handling, she was organizing an effort to break the world’s record for the largest number of people dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the same time, it was just a matter of time before he said … "Let’s!”
Never let it be said that I didn’t try to prepare. An entire 48 hours before we were set to show up at the park, I put my younger daughter’s DVD collection of Michael Jackson videos in the disc player and tried to figure out what was going on. How hard could this be, I thought. The first hitch in the plan came in the fact that I have absolutely no sense of coordination or rhythm. Walking in a straight line is my fitness activity of choice.
The second problem came in realizing that if I was going to mimic what Michael Jackson was doing in the video, I was going to have to not only do the same steps … I would have to do them in reverse since his image was facing me on the screen. Oh, dear. I made it through the first thirty seconds and gave up, counting on being surrounded by a cast of thousands to mask the inevitability of my faking it.
A whole 24 hours before the dance started, my boyfriend’s daughter mentioned that there was an instructional website devoted to teaching the greater world how to master each and every turn, spin and lurch in the Thriller video. Three hours before we were scheduled to leave for the park, I finally looked it up on my home computer.
On the plus side, the website was a wonderful resource, imparting instruction in each movement via example, repetition, consolidation, music, verbal cues and prompts and the ability to repeat each step over and over and over until you got it just right and were ready to learn the next. Relentlessness is a great teaching too. On the down side … it would take me a week to get the whole thing committed to memory. Assuming I had enough room on the old hard drive to even remember the whole thing. Really, how many hundreds of times did you have to listen to the long version of “American Pie” before you could sing all the lyrics and not just the “Bye Bye…” refrain?
I stared diligently at the screen, pushing the “repeat” button often and jerking spasmodically on command. And then my escorts arrived, and my standard for the day’s performance slipped from “git ’er done” to “as good as it gets.”
We poured into the park with about sixteen hundred other folks and went through a few warm-up sessions at the edge of ye olde swimming hole before the actual event. Humanity—and other Michael Jackson fans—showed up in all varieties. There was a goodly contingent of folks like me, grownups who were dressed for a summer stroll in a park on a Sunday afternoon. Namely, wearing khakis or capri pants and sandals and T-shirts, and maybe holding a beer. Then there was a vast delegation at the other end of the spectrum who courted the spirit of “Thriller” and Michael Jackson and the local TV cameras with ghostly makeup, ragged lace, tattered satin and fishnets. And boy, did THEY have the moves! Oddly enough, none of them seemed to be over thirty. Somewhere in the middle fell the younger kids, and the dilettantes who came sporting perhaps a single glove and a snap-brimmed hat. My guy sported a bright red vest, a dangling earring and, of course, the glove.
Eventually, the time of reckoning was upon us, the music started and the cameras rolled. I managed some respectable “zombie shuffles” and “head snaps,” and otherwise tried to flail and lurch in sync, secure in the knowledge that since I was a good half dozen rows from the front of the group, my primary value was as cannon fodder for the official head count. I tried not to bump into anybody when the direction of the dance suddenly turned and the group’s movement channeled the swift synchronicity of a school of sardines changing course in a nature documentary.
Later, all laughing and sweating and exhilarated, I filed the experience under the “been there, done that!” category, and went back to work secure in the knowledge that absolutely nobody in the larger world had any idea what I’d been doing that Sunday afternoon. Until we started the pretrial conference.
I emailed Mary Kay, who moves with the speed and efficiency of a panther in her promotional work, for an update. Well as a matter of fact, she said, while we hadn’t managed to come close to cracking the world record for a group “Thriller” dance, we’d set a new U.S. record and videos of our local effort had run on local news channels, the Today Show and CNN. Oh good lord!
I checked out a few of the videos for myself. I was buried somewhere in the background of one, for about two seconds. If I hadn’t been looking for myself and known where I was standing in the day’s lineup, I’d never have seen my own face. My colleague must have been watching this on a Jumbo-Tron with a magnifying glass to recognize me.
And yet…in the annals of what you can use to ambush your kids on a slow day, it still officially counts.
The park is now covered in a blanket of snow, the TV cameras have long since moved on to cover other deranged souls like the guys who jump into frozen lakes in their Speedos on New Years Day, and I haven’t done a “zombie shuffle” in six months.
Still … my youngest son just got engaged over the holidays. There won’t be a wedding for at least another year or so. I’d say that gives me plenty of time to learn the rest of the “Thriller” moves before the reception. Just in case it's a slow day…
“Your mother is on YouTube…” (pause for effect, note the holding of breath at this unforeseen announcement, the slight brow crinkle, the arch of one eyebrow slowly rising upwards in disbelief)
…"dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.”
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! With four kids to inform individually after the fact, trust me, I got all the mileage I possibly could in the maternal embarrassment department.
And doesn’t it feel just wonderful when that happens? A cosmic turning of the tables, a reaffirmation that you can still surprise them. Just when they thought—after the passage of the junior high and high school years—that you were okay to be around again, cue the theme music from “Jaws.” Gotcha!
I could write a thousand words or more about the look on my eighth grade daughter’s face when I showed up at the door of her classroom bearing Halloween cupcakes…and dressed like Pocahontas. Oh wait a minute, I did that already. But this was so much better.
Not that it was intentional to start with. I had been oblivious to the entire thing until I was sitting in my office one day, across the desk from a defendant and her attorney, ready to engage in what’s called the “pretrial conference” part of the case. I leaned forward politely and expectantly, thinking we would start talking about crime and punishment and alibis and mitigating circumstances, when he looked at me with an air of bemusement.
“Didn’t I just see you on television this weekend? In a park, in a really big group of people … dancing to Michael Jackson?”
I was BUSTED!!!!!!!
It was hard to keep a straight face after that for the rest of our official tête à tête.
As usual, when I’m engaging in silliness or risk of epic proportions, there’s a certain man that I hold dear who has his hand extended, saying “Let’s!”
This would be the same guy who has been responsible for my being on the back of a Harley flying down the interstate surrounded by a hundred other bikers coursing like blood through an artery, hanging on with one arm around his waist while I snapped pictures over his shoulder with the other. Or strolling around the grounds of a Renaissance Faire decked out in a lace-up bodice, long skirt and cleavage while he accompanied me in tights, period boots and a leather vest. Or cutting concrete pavers with a chop saw off the back of a Ford F-150. There’s rarely been a dull moment.
So when my friend Mary Kay announced that as part of a park promotion she was handling, she was organizing an effort to break the world’s record for the largest number of people dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the same time, it was just a matter of time before he said … "Let’s!”
Never let it be said that I didn’t try to prepare. An entire 48 hours before we were set to show up at the park, I put my younger daughter’s DVD collection of Michael Jackson videos in the disc player and tried to figure out what was going on. How hard could this be, I thought. The first hitch in the plan came in the fact that I have absolutely no sense of coordination or rhythm. Walking in a straight line is my fitness activity of choice.
The second problem came in realizing that if I was going to mimic what Michael Jackson was doing in the video, I was going to have to not only do the same steps … I would have to do them in reverse since his image was facing me on the screen. Oh, dear. I made it through the first thirty seconds and gave up, counting on being surrounded by a cast of thousands to mask the inevitability of my faking it.
A whole 24 hours before the dance started, my boyfriend’s daughter mentioned that there was an instructional website devoted to teaching the greater world how to master each and every turn, spin and lurch in the Thriller video. Three hours before we were scheduled to leave for the park, I finally looked it up on my home computer.
On the plus side, the website was a wonderful resource, imparting instruction in each movement via example, repetition, consolidation, music, verbal cues and prompts and the ability to repeat each step over and over and over until you got it just right and were ready to learn the next. Relentlessness is a great teaching too. On the down side … it would take me a week to get the whole thing committed to memory. Assuming I had enough room on the old hard drive to even remember the whole thing. Really, how many hundreds of times did you have to listen to the long version of “American Pie” before you could sing all the lyrics and not just the “Bye Bye…” refrain?
I stared diligently at the screen, pushing the “repeat” button often and jerking spasmodically on command. And then my escorts arrived, and my standard for the day’s performance slipped from “git ’er done” to “as good as it gets.”
We poured into the park with about sixteen hundred other folks and went through a few warm-up sessions at the edge of ye olde swimming hole before the actual event. Humanity—and other Michael Jackson fans—showed up in all varieties. There was a goodly contingent of folks like me, grownups who were dressed for a summer stroll in a park on a Sunday afternoon. Namely, wearing khakis or capri pants and sandals and T-shirts, and maybe holding a beer. Then there was a vast delegation at the other end of the spectrum who courted the spirit of “Thriller” and Michael Jackson and the local TV cameras with ghostly makeup, ragged lace, tattered satin and fishnets. And boy, did THEY have the moves! Oddly enough, none of them seemed to be over thirty. Somewhere in the middle fell the younger kids, and the dilettantes who came sporting perhaps a single glove and a snap-brimmed hat. My guy sported a bright red vest, a dangling earring and, of course, the glove.
Eventually, the time of reckoning was upon us, the music started and the cameras rolled. I managed some respectable “zombie shuffles” and “head snaps,” and otherwise tried to flail and lurch in sync, secure in the knowledge that since I was a good half dozen rows from the front of the group, my primary value was as cannon fodder for the official head count. I tried not to bump into anybody when the direction of the dance suddenly turned and the group’s movement channeled the swift synchronicity of a school of sardines changing course in a nature documentary.
Later, all laughing and sweating and exhilarated, I filed the experience under the “been there, done that!” category, and went back to work secure in the knowledge that absolutely nobody in the larger world had any idea what I’d been doing that Sunday afternoon. Until we started the pretrial conference.
I emailed Mary Kay, who moves with the speed and efficiency of a panther in her promotional work, for an update. Well as a matter of fact, she said, while we hadn’t managed to come close to cracking the world record for a group “Thriller” dance, we’d set a new U.S. record and videos of our local effort had run on local news channels, the Today Show and CNN. Oh good lord!
I checked out a few of the videos for myself. I was buried somewhere in the background of one, for about two seconds. If I hadn’t been looking for myself and known where I was standing in the day’s lineup, I’d never have seen my own face. My colleague must have been watching this on a Jumbo-Tron with a magnifying glass to recognize me.
And yet…in the annals of what you can use to ambush your kids on a slow day, it still officially counts.
The park is now covered in a blanket of snow, the TV cameras have long since moved on to cover other deranged souls like the guys who jump into frozen lakes in their Speedos on New Years Day, and I haven’t done a “zombie shuffle” in six months.
Still … my youngest son just got engaged over the holidays. There won’t be a wedding for at least another year or so. I’d say that gives me plenty of time to learn the rest of the “Thriller” moves before the reception. Just in case it's a slow day…
Monday, January 10, 2011
Angels in the Snow
I can still remember the snow falling in buckets and clumps, drenching the landscape, cloaking the interstate and obscuring any sense of where one lane ended and another one began, muffling the brightness of the far-off street lights like a scrim on a theater stage.
We could see the street lights above empty, wind-swept streets as we passed by the highway exit that was our best hope of finding a motel and waiting out the storm. We drove past because we had been in the left lane of the highway when the exit finally came into view, and the road surface was too slippery to change lanes quickly enough.
Surely, we thought, we’d get off at the very next exit. We weren’t in the middle of the Gobi desert or Antarctica. This was the American midwest. There had to be a motel somewhere nearby, somewhere with central heating and clean sheets and a bathroom, where we would admit that a blizzard in northern Wisconsin had proven that there existed some times you should just stay home and wait it out. I cautiously and slowly edged the minivan into the right lane—or what seemed to be a lane—and kept watching the dark side of the highway for a snow-covered green blur that would be the next road sign.
My daughter pored over a map of Wisconsin by a tiny reading light above the dashboard. If that last exit was Menomonee, there had to be smaller towns up ahead.
We had started the journey hours earlier, a familiar three hundred mile trek from our home in southern Wisconsin to the Twin Cities where my daughter was a college student. Sometimes her dad drove and I stayed home with the rest of the kids, and sometimes I drove. The trip one-way took a good six hours in good weather.
The weather had indeed been good when we started, that much was true. There were a few snow flurries going on as we pulled out of the driveway, but four-wheel drive will make you cocky. The weather forecasters were predicting snow in our path, but who ever expected total accuracy from the weatherman? We blithely set out in daylight, with the goal of making it to the Twin Cities not far off our usual schedule.
As daylight faded, the snow picked up. For about an hour we vacillated over whether it was getting heavy enough to justify benching ourselves at a motel until morning, or whether it was starting to lighten up. Wishful thinking can be so disarming. And with every mile we drew closer to our destination, the more tantalizing the thought of completing the journey without interruption.
As we sailed past the exit and watched the street lights get swallowed by a blanket of white, we finally knew we’d overreached. Still, we were confident that a room for hire would be ours soon. I drove cautiously, slowly, along the set of tracks cut in the snow by the drivers ahead. There appeared to be only one lane left to use, and every car on the road that night seemed to be following an unspoken rule to stay in that single lane, guided by the faint pinprick of taillights in the distance assuring that there was still a road to find, like hikers traversing a narrow ledge.
There are instants in your life when you don’t know if you will live or die, and we suddenly had ours. From out of the swirling, snowy blackness, a set of headlights perched higher than ours came up on our left. A semi-trailer whose driver had less patience than everyone else on the road inexorably crept up on us, bearing closer and closer. I could see the headlights casting their glow through the driving snow, and I focused totally on keeping the minivan straight and completely in its lane. The truck never touched us. But as it passed, the wind force it created caught the minivan like a giant hand and sent us sliding off at an angle, completely out of control. I remember that the sides of the truck were yellow and white as our headlights turned toward the giant machine while it passed methodically, implacably, like Leviathan cleaving the silent, wine-dark sea. As the truck drew away from us and disappeared into the dark, a drift of snow swirled off its roof and plunged us into total whiteout. We slewed and yawed blindly out of control. I turned the wheel desperately back and forth, trying to get some purchase beneath the wheels, but my efforts were useless.
After a couple of seconds that felt like a lifetime, we felt the front of the minivan hit something hard. A guardrail had kept us from sliding into a ditch or worse. “Honey, are you okay?” I asked. “Sure,” my daughter replied. “How about you?” I was fine too…but as I looked toward her, I could see the pinpoints of light signaling the approach of the next car in the single snow-covered lane. We realized instantly that our minivan, positioned crosswise across the lane of traffic, would be invisible in the storm to oncoming traffic until it would be too late to stop. I slammed the van into reverse and hoped that luck would go our way. If it didn’t, we’d be out of the van and over the guardrail before the next accident happened.
The wheels caught, and we pushed back into the lane of traffic. Slowly we drove on, and took the next exit. The road had barely been plowed. The map showed a small town a few miles north, and we aimed the damaged van that way with hope in our hearts. We were deep in the middle of nowhere. The few driveways that we passed were unplowed and uninviting. No sign announcing a town ahead was anywhere to be seen.
We finally drew near what seemed to be a farm, with a tall yard light silhouetted in the snow, and a large sign out front that gave it an air of respectability. The driveway looked as if it had been plowed at some point during the storm. We drove up to a small house. I left my daughter in the car, and knocked on the door.
A young woman answered, her eyes cautious and wary. We’d been in an accident on the interstate, I explained, and were trying to find a place to stay. The map said we’d find a town in this direction. Were we on the right track?
No, she answered. The town ahead no longer had any type of lodging. More important, she said, there was a dangerous and winding hill not far ahead of us on this road, and we should not try to navigate it in this storm. Well then, I replied. My daughter and I clearly needed a place to stay in this storm. We were easy keepers. Could we just pay her forty dollars to sleep on her kitchen floor?
She was sorry, she said, but she would have to refuse. She had young children in the house, and her husband was away from home, and she just did not feel comfortable with letting two strangers in the door while he was away. We would just have to get back on the interstate and keep driving.
I returned to the car, crushed and stunned. Ahead of us lay a road we had no business being on. Behind us lay the interstate where we had nearly died. The seaworthiness of the van was a wild card. My daughter busied herself with brushing and scraping the snow from the windows as I tried to inventory the damage to the front end and tell whether or not the van would be able to make it much farther. I called my husband to report on the night’s events and tell him that we were safe so far…but uncertain as to where we would end up.
A man with a beard and a dark snow-covered jumpsuit came up to my side of the van as I said goodbye on the phone and tried to figure out what to do next. I was startled, but rolled down the window and explained our situation. He thought for a minute, then had us follow him to the trailer located behind the home we had just been turned away from. His wife was out for a little while, and so he couldn’t commit just then to letting us stay the night…but at least we could get out of the cold.
We followed meekly…and when the pair of them were finally together, they must have decided we posed no hazard to them and folded us into their tiny, cramped home. As the snow continued to mount outside and we finally tucked into some warm food, we exchanged our stories. The young woman who had turned us away was in fact their daughter-in-law, they said. Until recently, the man with the beard and his wife had lived in a state farther east. But their only son was a farmer. And when it appeared that he needed help to keep the farm running, they had left their comfortable life behind and moved here to help him keep his business and his family on solid ground. It was not the life they had predicted, but it was the one they chose without hesitation.
My daughter and I slept in their bed that night, exhausted but warm and safe. By morning, the storm had ceased and the skies had cleared and the sunlight positively glistened on the newly fallen carpet of snow. We scraped the heavy coverlet of white off the van and said our goodbyes and heartfelt thanks. I slipped a fifty dollar bill on to a nearby shelf before we left.
My daughter and I retraced our path eight miles back to the exit we wished we had taken the night before and dropped the van at an auto repair shop to get checked before continuing on. The whole world seemed swept clean, a glorious radiance and purity to the snow cover that extended to the horizon. The highway surface itself, plowed clean in the middle of the night, looked as well-maintained as if Martha Stewart had been running the road crew. We chowed down over pancakes and sausage and pondered the strangeness of fortune and the kindness of strangers.
It has been a good eleven years since that desperate night in the snow. A snow- covered road still frightens me more than it used to. When I look back, I know that I have never been closer to being dead than at that instant when our car spun out of control in blinding snow in a blizzard on the interstate. I wonder at the workings of fate, and the hand of God, and the presence of angels. There’s a lot that I’ll never know.
But I know for sure that every so often angels appear without wings or halos, celestial choirs or golden flutes or harps. Once in a while, they just show up wearing a watch cap and sturdy Sorel boots and a snowmobile suit.
We could see the street lights above empty, wind-swept streets as we passed by the highway exit that was our best hope of finding a motel and waiting out the storm. We drove past because we had been in the left lane of the highway when the exit finally came into view, and the road surface was too slippery to change lanes quickly enough.
Surely, we thought, we’d get off at the very next exit. We weren’t in the middle of the Gobi desert or Antarctica. This was the American midwest. There had to be a motel somewhere nearby, somewhere with central heating and clean sheets and a bathroom, where we would admit that a blizzard in northern Wisconsin had proven that there existed some times you should just stay home and wait it out. I cautiously and slowly edged the minivan into the right lane—or what seemed to be a lane—and kept watching the dark side of the highway for a snow-covered green blur that would be the next road sign.
My daughter pored over a map of Wisconsin by a tiny reading light above the dashboard. If that last exit was Menomonee, there had to be smaller towns up ahead.
We had started the journey hours earlier, a familiar three hundred mile trek from our home in southern Wisconsin to the Twin Cities where my daughter was a college student. Sometimes her dad drove and I stayed home with the rest of the kids, and sometimes I drove. The trip one-way took a good six hours in good weather.
The weather had indeed been good when we started, that much was true. There were a few snow flurries going on as we pulled out of the driveway, but four-wheel drive will make you cocky. The weather forecasters were predicting snow in our path, but who ever expected total accuracy from the weatherman? We blithely set out in daylight, with the goal of making it to the Twin Cities not far off our usual schedule.
As daylight faded, the snow picked up. For about an hour we vacillated over whether it was getting heavy enough to justify benching ourselves at a motel until morning, or whether it was starting to lighten up. Wishful thinking can be so disarming. And with every mile we drew closer to our destination, the more tantalizing the thought of completing the journey without interruption.
As we sailed past the exit and watched the street lights get swallowed by a blanket of white, we finally knew we’d overreached. Still, we were confident that a room for hire would be ours soon. I drove cautiously, slowly, along the set of tracks cut in the snow by the drivers ahead. There appeared to be only one lane left to use, and every car on the road that night seemed to be following an unspoken rule to stay in that single lane, guided by the faint pinprick of taillights in the distance assuring that there was still a road to find, like hikers traversing a narrow ledge.
There are instants in your life when you don’t know if you will live or die, and we suddenly had ours. From out of the swirling, snowy blackness, a set of headlights perched higher than ours came up on our left. A semi-trailer whose driver had less patience than everyone else on the road inexorably crept up on us, bearing closer and closer. I could see the headlights casting their glow through the driving snow, and I focused totally on keeping the minivan straight and completely in its lane. The truck never touched us. But as it passed, the wind force it created caught the minivan like a giant hand and sent us sliding off at an angle, completely out of control. I remember that the sides of the truck were yellow and white as our headlights turned toward the giant machine while it passed methodically, implacably, like Leviathan cleaving the silent, wine-dark sea. As the truck drew away from us and disappeared into the dark, a drift of snow swirled off its roof and plunged us into total whiteout. We slewed and yawed blindly out of control. I turned the wheel desperately back and forth, trying to get some purchase beneath the wheels, but my efforts were useless.
After a couple of seconds that felt like a lifetime, we felt the front of the minivan hit something hard. A guardrail had kept us from sliding into a ditch or worse. “Honey, are you okay?” I asked. “Sure,” my daughter replied. “How about you?” I was fine too…but as I looked toward her, I could see the pinpoints of light signaling the approach of the next car in the single snow-covered lane. We realized instantly that our minivan, positioned crosswise across the lane of traffic, would be invisible in the storm to oncoming traffic until it would be too late to stop. I slammed the van into reverse and hoped that luck would go our way. If it didn’t, we’d be out of the van and over the guardrail before the next accident happened.
The wheels caught, and we pushed back into the lane of traffic. Slowly we drove on, and took the next exit. The road had barely been plowed. The map showed a small town a few miles north, and we aimed the damaged van that way with hope in our hearts. We were deep in the middle of nowhere. The few driveways that we passed were unplowed and uninviting. No sign announcing a town ahead was anywhere to be seen.
We finally drew near what seemed to be a farm, with a tall yard light silhouetted in the snow, and a large sign out front that gave it an air of respectability. The driveway looked as if it had been plowed at some point during the storm. We drove up to a small house. I left my daughter in the car, and knocked on the door.
A young woman answered, her eyes cautious and wary. We’d been in an accident on the interstate, I explained, and were trying to find a place to stay. The map said we’d find a town in this direction. Were we on the right track?
No, she answered. The town ahead no longer had any type of lodging. More important, she said, there was a dangerous and winding hill not far ahead of us on this road, and we should not try to navigate it in this storm. Well then, I replied. My daughter and I clearly needed a place to stay in this storm. We were easy keepers. Could we just pay her forty dollars to sleep on her kitchen floor?
She was sorry, she said, but she would have to refuse. She had young children in the house, and her husband was away from home, and she just did not feel comfortable with letting two strangers in the door while he was away. We would just have to get back on the interstate and keep driving.
I returned to the car, crushed and stunned. Ahead of us lay a road we had no business being on. Behind us lay the interstate where we had nearly died. The seaworthiness of the van was a wild card. My daughter busied herself with brushing and scraping the snow from the windows as I tried to inventory the damage to the front end and tell whether or not the van would be able to make it much farther. I called my husband to report on the night’s events and tell him that we were safe so far…but uncertain as to where we would end up.
A man with a beard and a dark snow-covered jumpsuit came up to my side of the van as I said goodbye on the phone and tried to figure out what to do next. I was startled, but rolled down the window and explained our situation. He thought for a minute, then had us follow him to the trailer located behind the home we had just been turned away from. His wife was out for a little while, and so he couldn’t commit just then to letting us stay the night…but at least we could get out of the cold.
We followed meekly…and when the pair of them were finally together, they must have decided we posed no hazard to them and folded us into their tiny, cramped home. As the snow continued to mount outside and we finally tucked into some warm food, we exchanged our stories. The young woman who had turned us away was in fact their daughter-in-law, they said. Until recently, the man with the beard and his wife had lived in a state farther east. But their only son was a farmer. And when it appeared that he needed help to keep the farm running, they had left their comfortable life behind and moved here to help him keep his business and his family on solid ground. It was not the life they had predicted, but it was the one they chose without hesitation.
My daughter and I slept in their bed that night, exhausted but warm and safe. By morning, the storm had ceased and the skies had cleared and the sunlight positively glistened on the newly fallen carpet of snow. We scraped the heavy coverlet of white off the van and said our goodbyes and heartfelt thanks. I slipped a fifty dollar bill on to a nearby shelf before we left.
My daughter and I retraced our path eight miles back to the exit we wished we had taken the night before and dropped the van at an auto repair shop to get checked before continuing on. The whole world seemed swept clean, a glorious radiance and purity to the snow cover that extended to the horizon. The highway surface itself, plowed clean in the middle of the night, looked as well-maintained as if Martha Stewart had been running the road crew. We chowed down over pancakes and sausage and pondered the strangeness of fortune and the kindness of strangers.
It has been a good eleven years since that desperate night in the snow. A snow- covered road still frightens me more than it used to. When I look back, I know that I have never been closer to being dead than at that instant when our car spun out of control in blinding snow in a blizzard on the interstate. I wonder at the workings of fate, and the hand of God, and the presence of angels. There’s a lot that I’ll never know.
But I know for sure that every so often angels appear without wings or halos, celestial choirs or golden flutes or harps. Once in a while, they just show up wearing a watch cap and sturdy Sorel boots and a snowmobile suit.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Angel on my Shoulder
It is entirely, absolutely, unassailably true that there is nothing cuter than a kitten. My son Robert and his fiancee Hannah brought this little guy home for the holidays, at six weeks and barely more than a pound. And with most of the extended family allergic to cats, guess who's babysitting until the next semester starts! He's growing by leaps and bounds, but still has a way to go before he's not at risk of being stepped on by the dog. Or by anybody else. In the meantime, he's mastered the trick of scampering up my pants leg and up the back of my shirt to reach my shoulders, where he perches like a parrot on the arm of a pirate. He'll outgrow it too soon...
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