Driving home from Toronto the other night, I ran into snow right around Syracuse, a turn of meteorological events which I actually welcomed, suffering as I do from a disorder known to the layperson as “packing dementia.” Classic symptoms include bringing too much stuff, bringing way too much stuff, bringing way way too much stuff, and forgetting to bring obvious and necessary stuff like underpants or a toothbrush, and the packing dementia sufferer will often find herself fashioning clever makeshift pajama tops out of Best Western pillowcases late at night because, while she remembered to pack not one but two teeny-weeny miniature sewing kits complete with scissors and thread and teeny-weeny miniature thimbles, she forgot to pack a pajama top, of any size. I always forget one thing — a brush, socks, the outfit for the wedding that is the reason for the trip in the first place — but living with packing dementia is all about improvising. Find a mall, cut up a bathmat, get on with it.

But my ability to improvise depends on what I’ve forgotten, and this time, I’d forgotten tapes for the car — not the worst oversight in my career of selective senility by a long shot, but a reasonably serious problem, given that 1) the drive is, give or take, eighteen hours round trip; 2) for a good fourteen of those hours, poor FM reception spreads before the dial a beggar’s banquet of evangelical Christianity, Jim “The Mullen Of The Airwaves” Rome, and Rádíó Fréé Qúébéc; and 3) the selection of cassettes for purchase at rest stops between New York City and Toronto consists of Conway Twitty’s Greatest Hits, Conway Twitty’s Somewhat Less Great, But Still Great Enough, Hits, A Very Twitty Christmas, I Love You Like A Pig Love Corn: Cajun Conway For Lovers, Conway Twitty Imports A Few Dozen Listless First-Graders Into The Studio And Reinterprets Children’s Songs You Used To Not Completely Hate In Front Of A Live Audience, the unabridged version of James Michener’s Land of Nod (read by Conway Twitty), and One-Hit Wonders 1974-1985.

“Oh, that last one doesn’t sound bad.” Honey, it is bad. It is so bad. Djb and I bought it two years ago on a similar border run; the same virulent no-tapes strain of packing dementia had struck us both prior to departure, and by the time we reached Binghamton, our willingness to join Taco in puttin’ on the Ritz had increased significantly, but the fact that Taco had easily the biggest “hit” on the entire compilation should give you an idea of the musical horrors contained in that plastic case. The only real “wonder” came from our trying to discern what, exactly, qualified these songs as “hits” — surely Silver’s “Wham Bam” couldn’t have actually charted anywhere, not even in the culturally befuddled seventies, and what kind of idiot names a band “The Floaters”? (The same idiot, apparently, who thinks that “Ralph” is an astrological sign. Yeah, don’t ask. Hee. “Floaters.”) Maybe it’s because enduring “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)” — the unbearably goofy musical love child of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” Up With People!, and Ron Palillo’s adenoids — made us want to hit things really hard, things like lead singer Joey Levine, or a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

But the other night, I didn’t even have the non-hit blunders to entertain me (just outside of Grimsby, enraged by David Dundas’s “Jeans On,” Djb forced me to pull off the road and run over the tape repeatedly in the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s). I had an old mix tape, which I’d already listened to three times even though it contained a Spin Doctors song, and I had Sinatra. I love Sinatra, but you can only practice a show-stopping karaoke reading of “The Best Is Yet To Come” that you know you will never have the sack to take public so many times before you get bored. By Syracuse, I’d gotten bored, and if the driving didn’t get more challenging, I’d have to plunk down seven bucks for Conway Twitty’s Gregorian chant album, and as hilarious as Magnum Twitsterium sounds in theory…hey, snow. Yay!

Several hours later, the interior of the car lit by the glow of my white knuckles, I had to rethink my position on the whole “hey snow yay” thing. The snow itself, sure, yay — I like the snow, and I even like driving in the snow, especially at night. It feels like a test, a mission for a few hardy souls, all of us shivering in the cones of light at the fuel pumps just before midnight while the flakes slant silently down a few feet away. Then it’s back out onto the highway, where a few of the hardy souls don’t really grasp the concept of a middle ground between continuing at eighty-five miles an hour in slippery conditions and hitching along with their hazards on and a foot poised tensely over the brake. I like driving in the snow. It’s everyone else driving in the snow at the same time as me that I don’t like.

The social contract of driving — if such a thing exists at other times, which I believe is open to debate — goes right out the window in a snowstorm, especially for eighteen-wheelers, who wouldn’t slow down for a Biblical hail of chipmunks, much less a measly half inch of slush in the Poconos. While I don’t particularly care if the driver of a semi containing eight tons of frozen spinach wants to hydroplane down the steepest mountainside in Pennsylvania on his own time, nor do I want to come to on the shoulder wearing the guard rail as an ascot if he hits a slippery patch and sends my airbag-less Honda triple-lutzing off the road. It’s just spinach, J.J. McClure. Slow down.

You too, That Guy. I realize that getting stuck with the little woman’s white Ford Probe while your own ultra-manly car is in the shop threatens your sense of your own masculinity, but when you sonic-boomed past me in the left lane just now with GNR blaring heterosexually from the subwoofers in your terrifyingly gigantic penis, my thoughts turned not to your obvious prowess with the ladies, but rather to the mysterious process by which a man with an IQ of twelve and testosterone blindness can procure a driver’s license. There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to drive the girly car for a few days, so suck it up and slow down before you get the rest of us killed.

Hee. “Probe.”

I prefer the speedsters to the creepers, though. I cringe as the speedsters pass me, hoping their luck doesn’t choose that precise moment to run out, but as long as they keep a safe distance from me most of the time, I leave it to natural selection to deal with them. It’s a different story with the creepers. I certainly advocate caution while driving in precipitation, but let’s distinguish between “caution” and “setting the cruise control to ‘continental drift,'” shall we? If you really can’t bear to venture above twenty-five miles an hour on an interstate, perhaps it’s best if you stay home until spring comes instead of lurching fearfully along, half on the shoulder, getting passed by penny farthing bicycles, because at that speed, you won’t get home until spring anyway, so why not spend the time reading a book? I can tell that every mile is taking years off your life, and when I come up over a rise doing a moderate fifty and have to stand on the brakes to avoid rear-ending your performance-art rendition of Yertle the Turtle, then whip around you in the left lane with That Guy up my tailpipe, it takes years off my life too. If you don’t feel that it’s safe to drive in the snow, well, then don’t drive in the snow. Get a cup of coffee. Take a little nap. Hole up in a Holiday Inn and wait for the snow to end. But if you do get on the highway, you’ll have to do better than thirty.

Well, unless everyone else is doing thirty because snow the consistency of oatmeal is coming down out of the sky like God just decided to dump the whole box at once, at which time everyone on the road enters into Kübler-Ross’s five stages of driving in the snow.

Denial. “Oh, this isn’t really snow. It’s just…rain, in flake form! Okay, maybe it is snow, but it’s not actually falling snow. It’s…blowing snow! Blowing from a snowbank that I…can’t actually see, but it’s clearly not snow that’s in the act of actually snowing, and the weather forecast didn’t say anything about snow in the first place, so I won’t even turn my wipers on. I prefer to stick my head out the window. I don’t care if it’s twenty-eight degrees. It’s refreshing! The snow, which I remind you is merely blowing, doesn’t sting my face at all!”

Anger. “Fuck you, snow. Fuck you, trucks that spray me with scuzzy shaved ice so that I can’t see anything. Fuck you, That Guy — no, FUCK YOU, That Guy! If you want to go faster, PASS me already, DIPSTICK! Oh, no, I know — why doesn’t everyone in the right lane just VOTE ON IT first? Let’s see a show of hands, okay? Everyone who wants That Guy to FREAKIN’ GO AROUND, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, raise your hands! Well, look at that! It’s UNANIMOUS! God, FINALLY! THANK you! Oh, oh, NICE SIGNAL, you JACKASS! Try driving A REAL CAR for a change, you TINY PENIS-Y…you TINY-PENISED…YOU HAVE A TINY PENIS! Yeah! Fuck you, and fuck your wife’s cheesy Probe too. Pffft. Okay, minivan — neutral? NOT THE GEAR YOU NEED HERE! Also? FUCK YOU.”

Bargaining. “If it stops snowing in the next twenty minutes, I could make up time on the rest of the trip, and when I get home, I vow to floss, plant a tree, and tidy up around the house with all of the time I saved. … The next thirty to forty minutes? Flossing and tree-planting still on the table, here. … Okay, how about this. In addition to the flossing and the tree-planting and the up-tidying, I’ll also throw in a greater tolerance for the antics of ankle-bi– er, ‘children,’ a donation to the PBA, and fewer impulse purchases of shoes. All this, in exchange for the ability to see further than ten feet past the end of the hood. … Hello?”

Depression. “It’s not pathetic enough that I might die out here, another anonymous victim of fate’s caprice, all alone in the freezing cold of the Delaware Water Gap in the presence a mix tape with the Spin Doctors on it. No, on top of everything else, my humiliating death will take twelve hours to accomplish, and will probably occur at the hands of That Guy. If I had any goddamn wiper fluid left, I would drink it, but I don’t. I beg of you…kill me.”

Acceptance. “So, my spine has now assumed the shape of the car seat. Hey, now I can join the circus! Neat!”

Back in the tri-state area at last, dead but somehow still driving, I listened to the radio, which informed me that a forty-car chain-reaction pile-up had snarled up part of the Jersey Turnpike. The reporter did not mention a white Ford Probe specifically, but oh, I knew. I turned off my wipers for a few blissful minutes in the Lincoln Tunnel and sang to myself. “The best is yet to come, and babe, won’t it be fine.”

January 6, 2003

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