SNOW AND HILLS, PART TWO
4/30/00. 11:43pm CDT. Home.

I stop around Norman, by this point a complete white-out, with at least a few inches of snow on the ground. I needed caffeine, hot liquids, a full tank of gas, and a break.

Got all but the break, really. Called work, half-considering just getting off the road for the day right now, but instead of sympathy I got a not-subtle request to get back to town EARLY because they could use an extra hand on the early newscasts. Sometimes I swear I'm too human to be in this business. So I get back on the road, against my better judgement -- against even my lesser judgement -- and keep plugging away.

As I close in on OKC I pass a road sign advising which radio station I should tune in for weather information. I pop the tape out of the radio and switch over.

I swear to you I am not making up this part.

They're in a commercial break. It's a lawn care spot. All about this product you can use if the weeds have already come in, and this sister product for use to prevent them from coming in if they haven't already. I look at the cars on the road around me, we're averaging about 20 mph at best, and look at the radio in disbelief. Finally the DJ comes back on and tells me there's a good chance of snow later on tonight and into tomorrow. Then he plays 'La Bamba' and I shove the tape back in, swearing.

OKC was impassible. No way any of us shoould have been out on these roads, but there we were, idiots with a death wish. Followed a school bus across a steep and curved overpass and almost lost the remains of my sanity doing it. This, at five miles an hour.

Crossing a 5-lane bridge, road merging from the right, I'm in the middle with cars on either side (have you people never driven in snow? can you give me some freakin' space for crying out loud?) and up ahead I see, maybe 100 yards up, a guy going perpendicular to the road, backwards, toward my right across the bridge. Toward the guardrail. I know immediately he'll bounce back and be squarely in my way about the time I get there.

The options I don't have:

Swerve (crash)
Crange lanes quickly (blocked on both sides)
Brake (crash)

I am, as they say, screwed.

So I decide to VEER. Slowly. Left. Away from Where This Idiot Is Going To Be In A Minute.

The guy to my left, I assume, sees me coming, because he gives me enough space to do it. I never fully lane-change, only maybe half. It's enough to miss the front bumper coming at me from my right by about 6 inches or so. At best. I glance over as I pass, and he's so close I can't see the front of his car. I expect to hear the same scrape I heard on the bridge before, but I never do.

Soon as I'm clear, I start to veer back to my lane, and I look left to make sure I haven't completely hosed the guy who was on that side, between me and the concrete median. I see he's fine, then never, NEVER do I look in the rearview to see what happened to the Sideways Guy. I have to assume SOMEONE hit him -- too many of us idiots out there for him to have gotten out of that.

But with what I've been through already -- and what the last hundred miles to Tulsa have in store -- knowing it wasn't me is enough.

[here is part one]