Something You’ll Have to Experience Yourself

By John Addyman  |  john.addyman@yahoo.com

 

We were waiting for the music to start at the Holiday Concert featuring the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra at Canandaigua high school in December. The talk in my little neighborhood of the audience was very friendly.

Three ladies behind my wife and me were talking about Mustangs and driving them in the snow. The woman right behind me had a 1967 Mustang when she was young, just starting her career.

“I loved that car,” she told her two friends.

A moment passed while the three of them thought about cars from days of yore.

“I had a Mustang, too,” one of the friends answered. “How did yours drive in the winter?”

“Terrible,” the first one admitted. “It was awful.”

“Mine could never make it up Main Street when it was snowing,” her friend said.

I thought about that. In my life, I owned a 1969 Camaro Rally Sport, a car very similar to a Mustang. I had all kinds of young-man confidence driving it through snow until the afternoon I tried to pass someone on an ice-grooved road in southeastern Pennsylvania. I ended up doing a 360-degree turn in the road and onto — and through — a lawn hedge and a lot of arborvitae before ending up on a lawn patio with some very nice furniture.

The ladies and I decided we all liked cars with long hoods, a lot of power and good looks and a racy, rebel feel.

But those cars, as pretty as they were to look at, were awful in the snow.

When we lived in Pennsylvania, we would have a lot of nice sunny winter weather, then get buried with snow two or three times a year. When the roads were reasonably clear, you had no trouble getting around.

For the last 18 years, when I’m asked why we moved to Western New York and the Great Lakes, the story always goes like this:

“John, what brought you to the Rochester area?”

“Grandchildren.”

“Grandchildren?”

“Yes, they were here and my wife and I weren’t. I retired and moved to be close to my grandkids.”

“Did anyone ever tell you about lake-effect snow?”

“No,” I said.

“How was your first lake-effect driving experience?”

“Unforgettable,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Oh! Is right. I was on the Thruway. I had a business appointment in Syracuse. I drove into a snow squall and couldn’t see the end of my hood. I got behind a tractor-trailer and followed him closely. We were doing about 20 mph and I figured he could see where he was going, because I sure couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t you pull off the road?”

“I didn’t know where the end of the road was. That morning, it was like driving in the middle of a pillow. There was no contrast to anything, everything was white.”

“Scary.”

“You think?”

“So, what happened?”

“The truck got slower and slower and came to a stop. I was sitting there with my windows getting fogged up, thinking ‘Here’s where the next tractor-trailer behind us turns me and my car into a very flat pop-tart.’”

“And…”

“Well, suddenly, I noticed there were structures around us. The truck had led me to an exit. I thought I was still on the Thruway. He got off and so did I. There was a parking area nearby and I stayed there until the squall passed, turned around and drove home.

“My wife asked me how my day had been when she got home. ‘White…very, very white,’ I told her.”

By the end of our first year in the Rochester area, I had developed an abiding respect for lake-effect snow, up close and personal. I got my baptism on a Friday night in December.

Our sidewalk pretty much runs pure west to east in front of our house. I went out to snow blow that sidewalk in the teeth of a lake-effect snow event, where the wind was roaring from the west. I started on one side and ran the snowblower from east to west, or from one end of the sidewalk to the other. Straight into the wind. I’m from Pennsylvania and Connecticut, what did I know?

After 20 minutes of this, I walked in the back door of our house and presented myself to my good wife.

“Oh my God, John,” she said. “What happened to you?”

“Snowblowing,” I explained.

My wife and I, when we had been married about 11 years, had shoveled ourselves out of our house in four feet of snow. So, she knows what snow looks like.

But she had never seen a snow-covered me after 20 minutes of lake-effect mirth and glee. One side of me was completely white and on display as I stood in the kitchen. I had ice in my ears. I had ice in my nose. I had icicles on my eyelashes. My beard was white. I had packed ice around my neck and up my sleeves. I looked like a Yeti, standing there between the
sink and the counter.

She asked a practical question: “Did you get the sidewalk done?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you.”

“Then the wind blew it right back where I had just cleared it,” I explained. My little electric snowblower loved to throw snow 30 feet. The lake-effect storm loved to return it…with a little relish.

“What are you going to do about the snow?” my wife asked.

“I’m going to wait for it to stop laughing at me,” I said.

“When will that be?”

“Tomorrow morning, after I’ve had some nice hot cocoa tonight, gotten rid of all the snow and ice covering me and can feel my feet
and nose and fingers again.”

“You’re dripping on my floor,” my good wife said.

That was a long time ago.

Since then, all three of my grandkids have grown up to be super young men and woman. And I’ve learned to respect lake-effect snow and to snow-throw with the wind instead of against it.

When we moved here, we had looked for the right house through the whole area for more than a year. I can’t remember too many of those trips in the dead of winter under lake-effect conditions. But my son-in-law, Chad, the engine who produced two of my grandkids, had offered some advice in his Rochesterian way.

I had asked him specifically about lake-effect snowstorms. There were rumors back in Connecticut.

Rather than getting into a lengthy discussion with a lot of detail that would have kept my wife and me where we were instead of moving 350 miles to Rochester, he just said cryptically, “It’s something you’ll have to experience yourself.”

He was absolutely right.

There’s nothing like a full-blown lake-effect storm to remind you that you’re human. Just human.

And I know that during my next spell of snow-blowing, I’ll be thinking about how much I love spring, summer and fall in this area…and how much I miss that Camaro and the Mustangs those ladies drove.