Snow is a lot different way "up North"
By Staff
Leada DeVaney, Editor
I hope you made it through the blinding snow storm we experienced this last weekend. Oh wait, we didn't have one, did we?
I woke up Saturday morning, fully expecting to see a blanket of snow on the ground. I sat up and through sleepy eyes squinted towards the blinds in my bedroom. Through the slits in the blinds I saw a patch of white. Immediately, I jumped up and looked out the window. It was my white car I was seeing through the blinds, not a blanket of snow. Oh well.
That certainly wasn't the case a few weeks ago, however, when I spent some time in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio. I was working at a paper our company owns in Ironton, Ohio, which just happens to sit near the borders of Kentucky and West Virignia. The closeness of the tri-state area means I flew into West Virignia, stayed in Kentucky and worked in Ohio.
I'd heard the talk about snow since my arrival, but until that time had just had to deal with the bitter cold. That all changed on Friday, my last day spent above the Mason-Dixon Line. I woke up to about 6 inches of snow blanketing the ground with more coming down.
"Blizzard!" I screamed. A few second later, the telephone in my hotel room rang. It was Kevin, the publisher of the paper I was visiting.
"Do you want me to come and get you?" he politely asked. "They've already cleared the roads so you shouldn't have any problems, but if it makes your nervous, I can come pick you up."
I thought about the offer and my first inclination was to say yes. Then I remembered Kevin was from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and didn't know much more about driving on snow than I did.
I decided to brave it in my small rental car. First, however, I went down to the hotel's contintental breakfast and put some free muffins into my purse in case I got stuck in a snowbank.
Armed with food, I teetered out to the car, trying not to break a leg on the ice (Rule No. 1 – high heels and ice do not mix.). I inched out of the parking lot and drove across the big bridge spanning the Ohio River. I inched along, while cars around me zoomed past. There was no snow on the road, just mounds of brown ice pushed to the side. The snow that was falling was a soft wave of powder, not a sheet of ice.
I sped up a bit. I wasn't slipping or sliding and driving on the cleared roads was simple. In 10 short minutes, I was at the newspaper office.
"So, you made it OK?" Kevin asked.
"Barely," I replied. "It was awful. I think I saw the Abominable Snowman."
An exaggeration? Sure. But it sounded better than "it was a snap."
