I Hate Winter

It can't be said strongly enough: I HATE WINTER!!!

OK, sure, it can be pretty. For maybe the first twenty minutes after it stops snowing and the trees are covered with pristine white. But only if the light is right - and the camera ready? - and you're sitting warm and still somewhere with a view of it and nowhere you need to go that in any way can be considered "outside". After a bit, white on white on white on white just gets boring. Not just a little bit boring, but Jo Anne Worley singing-out, fingers-in-the-dimples boring.

We were growing a nice crop of icicles on the roof a bit back. Those can be appreciated from inside, but then one has to worry about ice dams, even with the new roof. Those are gone now.

We're in this goofy weather pattern right now where it snows nearly every day, and in between the temperature bottoms out. While it's snowing you get the wonderful experience of flakes sliding down inside your collar and blowing up the inside your ear. You can't see where the ice is under the fluffy stuff you're walking on, or where the bumps are or curb edges, or anything else. So every step is wobbly, throws your legs to all sides so your kneed grind, and risks dumping you to the ground so you can do more damage to your tendons.

We believe in salt here. Halleluia! It's the only thing that keeps walking a semi-sane possibility. It also follows you back into your car to coat car mats and rust out your car floor from the top down, not just the bottom up as the car splashes its way around. A lot of ins and outs during the day leaves salty puddles on the floor which wick up your pants legs and leave a thick, jagged, inch-wide band of salt on the back sides. After two days the bands are so thick they make your pants legs flare out by themselves, and don't completely come out during your water-saving washing cycles.

(Yes, I wear my work pants two days. You got a problem with that?)

Obviously, I drive though this crap called winter. It's not just walking that raises issues.

There are tricks you need to learn to be able to drive through the stuff. For example, while you need to heat your windshield in order to be able to clear the ice and snow off it for visibility, you also need to be able to hit that sweet spot where your windshield cools off without depositing ice so that the new falling snow doesn't melt and stick but just blows past while you drive.

Too much melting also just changes the fluffy stuff to ice that builds up on your wiper blades creating their own wet streaks across your windshield to reduce visibility with each stroke. You see many drivers cope with this by the "thunk" method of ice clearing. Mostly they are stopped while doing this, such as at a light, but I've seen this done in motion. Rolling the driver's window down while the wipers are in motion, they reach out to catch the blade in it nearest approach, quickly lift and release so it goes "thunk" down on the windshield, hopefully thus breaking off the accumulating ice chunks which are causing the problems. Many repetitions may be needed. Eventually even this fails and one must pull over, get out, and break off all the ice and wiggle all parts of the wiper blade to ensure function again.

For a bit.

If it's really cold, sometimes washer fluid, better known as "blue juice", can help melt ice and frost off windshields. Of course, there is always a thin film of residue left that does not evaporate quickly in cold weather, so one is left with a - hopefully short - period when the total windshield is a blur and only the wind can clear it. One develops the skill of staying on the road while this occurs - or one doesn't. In a panic situation, one can quickly reapply blue juice to melt away the film and reinstate visibility, but do be mindful that the situation repeats. It is possible to run out of blue juice trying to cure the problems left by non-evaporation of the previous application.

If it is the first really cold spell of winter, you can ask yourself before you start the squirters if you've remembered to purge the summer half-and-half mix of blue juice with water, replacing it with full strength blue juice. It's one of the reasons to schedule an oil change for late fall. Of course, you have to do the purging on the way to the change, or else they just top it off and your solution is just a tad stronger than it was. The reason this is a problem is that it will freeze when the temperature approaches zero. There you are driving along trying to clear slush and salt and muddy spray off your windshield and all you get is wipers smearing the stuff, taking you from spotty visibility to absolutely none. If you've not made the changeover, do not hit that switch! If you've just made this rookie mistake, well... do you still pray?

If visibility issues are cured, there's the plethora of moving issues.

It's been my observation that there comes a very surprised look over the face of a driver whose vehicle has just gone from moving straight ahead to heading in a 90-degree angle and diving nose first into a snowbank. I passed one such this week. Lucky for me, the snowbank in question was tall enough to keep him from crossing the center median and hitting my car. Lucky for him, traffic behind him was wise enough to keep their distance, enabling him to pull out of the snowbank and back on to the road, hopefully a slower and wiser driver.

But maybe not. Physics isn't taught well in schools these days, it seems. The simple rule that everyone forgets, until winter driving reminds them the hard way, is that in an absence of friction, inertia triumphs. Every single time. No exceptions. Not even for you. All that cold wet stuff provides that absence of friction.

I'm not exempting myself from this lesson. I've managed to knock down a road sign, dent a bumper in a snow/ice bank, slide through a stop sign. And not all in the same incident. I've learned enough times that I'm starting to remember, now. I have no problem with being the slow driver on the road in winter, and am perfectly content with letting those who do have a problem with that pass me in the left lane. (Of course, they tend to kick up lots of snow and dirty slush onto my car as they pass, so I keep the washer fluid and wipers ready.)

Corners and stop/start situations are always the worst. Too many cars going through before you and spinning their tires to do so have generally laid down a nice layer of ice. This is the real test of traction versus inertia. When possible, I've learned the Minnesota Winter Stop: Don't! This is not strictly legal, of course, so cover your a**es by stopping ahead of time while there's still some traction, then rolling slowly through. If you don't have to stop, you don't have to start. Inertia works for you, not against. Of course, this means other drivers have figured out the same thing, so you have to be doubly careful when approaching intersections for cars pulling out suddenly from side roads, or just poking their noses out that half car length it takes these days to see over the plowed up snow hills on corners to make sure that you are really there and heading their way. As in, RIGHT NOW!

Slick hills are an issue. In the "olden days" one fishtailed uphill, until front wheel drive swapped push with pull, a much more secure motion. Even with that, it was possible to not go anywhere while wheels just spun uselessly in first gear. It was handy to have a stick shift - or a reliable automatic - that you could pop into second - or one gear above whatever speed you were trying to obtain. That way the engine didn't have enough extra energy to spin wheels, just enough to get them going at the same speed that the car needed to move at.

Super cold days are really trying. When it's -15 F out there, those black bands going down your lane are not the spots that are cleared of snow, or where it has melted from salt, like they are on warmer snowy days. Those black stripes are where countless slow-moving cars have laid down ice from their exhaust pipes. Being ice, one should be able to predict the outcome when one driving on it has to turn or stop, especially at some speed. Unfortunately, hundreds of drivers every black-ice day learn the hard way. They are lulled by a sense of security because they can manage to get up to some speed. They forget can does not mean should, and going doesn't equal stopping ability.

I wish I could say that black means ice and white means salt, or black means clear and white means snow. Every day, every hour, every road, it can be different. One has to learn. And relearn. I have come up with only two hard and fast rules for winter driving. And no, one of them is not "Don't." I could wish, but....

Rule 1: Other drivers are stupid. You can't cure stupid. Not only that, it's contagious. You can catch it by getting too close. So avoid them. Stay back, stay alert.

Rule 2: Don't get arrogant. The world will quickly demonstrate to you that you can also be stupid. It comes with consequences. So, stay back. Stay alert. And be grateful you made it to your destination.

Take last night. I was in Eagan at 4:15, ready to head home. It's about 50 miles from there, even in heavy rush hour traffic only about an hour-and-a-half drive. Light traffic it's about an hour. I finally walked in the house about 8:30, and yes, damned grateful to be there. Here. I'm planning on staying here until Monday morning. There are books to read, TV to watch, laundry to send to the basement for a son to do so I can avoid the stairs, meals to prepare and serve/eat, naps to take.

Nowhere outside.

Not one inch.

Nope.

I can almost pretend it's not winter.