Snowed in in Amherst, NS
I have been thinking a lot about snow storms lately, and snow days—about putting your life on hold and waiting for the weather to pass to start things up again. Cancelling class, cancelling choir, postponing gigs, postponing trips, not going in to work. These snow days are a peculiar thing to me, a new thing. On the prairies we don’t have snow days. School goes ahead every day, no matter the weather. If students call in sick, they have to catch up; if teachers call in sick, the school calls a sub. There is no shutting down a school for the weather; it just never happens.
I was wondering why this might be. Honestly, I do think that if we were to shut things down when the weather seemed awful in Regina, we would be in our homes half the winter. The roads get bad, and then never really get good, and it’s -50° for several weeks every winter, but we don’t shut things down for that either. Yesterday everyone was predicting a blizzard, and in anticipation, everything shut right down. The snow didn’t really end up coming until the evening, but people were safe, and no one seemed perturbed that we had shut things down pre-emptively, that probably we could have all finished out the day and driven home fine. Because snow days are a part of life out here.
Last week, I realized the merit of snow days. My sister and I were driving home from Moncton, where I had come to pick her up from two months of training for a new job, and we were driving towards Truro in what was supposed to be a storm, though it didn’t look like one yet. As we drove, it started to snow very mildly, and while it never really picked up, it did continue to snow, and there were moments in the drive where we would come up at a patch of snow on the highway. Sometimes I felt the car slide or swerve a little on the road, and I slowed down, wanted to be off the road, but thought we should just keep going, because that’s what we always do. We always go to school on the bad days; we always keep driving once we’ve started. But the snow was different. It wasn’t the dry snow we have in Saskatchewan. It wasn’t even the slippery, but packed, snow that I’m used to in the city. It was wet—the whole road was wet in many places, and the drifts of snow were wet slush.
We got into Nova Scotia. We past Amherst, where we stopped for gas and to top up on windshield wiper fluid, and we got back onto the highway, where we continued to drive as normal—but slowly, because I still didn’t feel good about the roads. And then in a moment, one of our tires lost control, and we were swerving off the highway. There was a sign to our right, and I thought we might hit it, maybe that would slow us down. We didn’t, but we ran right off the road—before I knew it, the left side of our van was deep in the snow bank and two men were rushing down the bank to help.
And suddenly all I could think was, “What a drag. Now how are we going to get the car out of this mess?” and, “Like hell I’m driving again today.” But I was also happy we were alive, happy we hadn’t rolled the van, happy we hadn’t swerved into another vehicle, because that would have left us far worse off.
After only a short wait, a tow truck came, and shortly after there was a friendly Mountie to help us, too. We waited in the back of her patrol car as they slowly hauled the Windstar out of the snow.
It wasn’t what we had planned, but we had a wonderful night in Amherst. We checked into a hotel, bought some apples at the superstore, tried to go for supper at the pub, were turned away as they were taking a snow day, too, but ended up in another pub where we did get supper. And in the morning, I did the proofreading work I was supposed to the day before. We had to cancel some things we had planned for the weekend, and my work was also pushed late, but it was all fine, and it would have been fine, too, if we’d have noted the storm watch, and stayed another night in Moncton. I must remember that next time.
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