December 29, 1999

Gearing up for white-knuckle driving

By Garrett Leiva
Herald Editor
       When William Shakespeare spoke of now being the winter of our discontent, his Buick wasn't stuck in a snowbank. No one utters prose when they're up to the wheel welds in white stuff.
      Now life comes with a few certainties: death, taxes, someone ahead of you will have more than 12 items in the grocery store express lane. In northern Michigan there is one more certainty: white-knuckle-black-ice-turn-the-steering wheel-with-the-spin winter driving.
      It may begin as a early Halloween trick, a thankless drive on Thanksgiving or - like your Aunt Dottie's crocheted long underwear - a unreturnable Christmas gift. What ever the calendar date, winter driving is a season few celebrate as a holiday. Unless the other mobile in your two-car garage starts with the word snow and a pull chord.
      Like so many things in our society, there is a long-standing class system associated with winter driving. The have's with garages and the garageless have not's. Then there are those with 2.5 children who park a $16,000 vehicle outside to make way for a Pandora's box of sporting goods, lumber, bicycles and assorted garage sale fodder.
      While I have no whole number or decimal point children, I do baby my defanged 1972 Pontiac Lemans perpetually parked inside the garage. Which means every frosty morning I'm outside cleaning my Jeep's windshield , trying to keep up with the Jones' and their battery-powered window scraper and remote car starter.
      Now baring a dead battery, frozen doors, or that little voice reassuring you tongues don't stick to hood ornaments, the real winter headache begins - driving. When it comes to dashing through the snow in a 16 valve, fuel-injected, 220 horsepower sleigh there is usually very little laughing all the way. Instead, for many drivers, it is the eerie silence of panic.
      That is unless you have 4WD written next to the gear shift.
      Now not every driver with four-wheel drive acts like Superman in a kryptonite-free passing lane, but there are those that believe having two driveshafts makes one impervious to ice and snow. Perhaps they know a short cut to grandma's house as they go over the guardrail and through the expressway meridian.
      Another highly subscribed to winter driving style is the porthole. Every year you see this guy coming a mile away, after all its hard to miss the four foot high Mohawk snowdrift on the roof of his car. Of course, he might have a hard time missing you also since he apparently uses a toothbrush with two bristles to clean off his windshield. That is if he can see the road at all with his head level to the steering wheel; peering out the window of opportunity created around the wiper blades by the defrost setting.
      When it comes to my own personal winter driving experiences there is one image that I will carry for the rest of my days behind the wheel - antenna balls.
      Before my four years in Michigan's upper peninsula I had no clue to the functionality of these brightly colored foam balls. When snow falls at a rate of six feet in 24 hours and snowbanks swallow Subarus whole, their purpose, unlike the yellow center line, becomes perfectly clear. That way when you approach an intersection you know which antenna ball has the right of way, eh.
      Eight foot snow drifts aside, winter driving doesn't have to be a totally negative experience. Once while doing two perfect 360 degree turns on black ice in a 1978 Chevette I had my one and only moment of Zen. Careening toward the ditch, I was struck with such a sense of inner calm I turned down the radio, lest it disrupt the mood.
      Rocking the transmission from first to reverse to free myself later proved less than a religious experience however. It wasn't prose that I was uttering that morning as I ground the four-speed gearbox, merely a few words of winter discontent.
      Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail at gleiva(at)gtherald.com.