Me and Snow

I'm an apologist. I want you to know that right from the start. I apologize for moving from the Snow Belt.

It's been almost seventeen years since I was last in a snowstorm, or snow for that matter--that is if you don't count the latest snowfall on record in Arizona I drove in the following year on my birthday--April 20, 1995. But that's another story.

The date I was last in snow was February 14, 1994.  It would be called by the media, "The Valentine Day Snow Storm," the second one on that very same day in four years.  In the first, it took me nearly seven hours to drive from Lincolnwood, Illinois (roughly Devon and Lincoln Avenues) to Munster, Indiana.

That was usually a one hour drive, forty-two miles door-to-door, to Munster, a community hugging the border between the Prairie and Hoosier states.  That day was almost unimaginable.  The snow was relentless, driving speeds literally crawling to as slow as 1-2 miles per hour at times. I would have gone mad had it not been for the shock jock radio duo of Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. I was in the car for their entire drive time shift and then some. They lightened the load off my mind, saved me from losing my sanity.

Then four years to the day later I end up in an even worse storm, driving up from sales calls I had made that day down in Indianapolis.  As I headed northeast up the I-65 corridor the snow came harder and faster and faster and harder until I got to the West Lafayette exit and found out that the Indiana State smokies had closed the Interstate north. I was directed off the road and headed to find a hotel room and found the last one at the local Holiday Inn.

That was it, I told myself. Maybe my wife's idea of moving to Arizona was a good one after all. Our trip there two years earlier, scoping out the place, dreaming (more her than me) about the possibility of living there someday, was now looking like a rather grand idea.

As I look back and reminisce I feel for all those people on the roads today in Chicago, my former home town. Those stuck on Lake Shore Drive for four, five, or six hours, trying to get home to their families, or just home.  I'm sorry you had to endure all that. Really sorry.  The Blizzard of 2011 will certainly leave its mark on your psyche.

I'm sorry for that and I apologize for not being there with you, toughing it out like any good Chicagoan does and knows how to do. 

Stay warm my friends.

Brad Nelson

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IDENTITY: LOST by Pascal Marco
Release date: June 14, 2011
Oceanview Publishing