A bad decision had a good result

If only the car hadn’t started.
It was Christmas morning 30 years ago, December 1983.
And the temperatures had dipped lower than I’d ever seen them before.
Some accounts say it was 20 below zero. Some say 25 below.
Roads were “snow-covered, slick and hazardous” as the Indiana State Police like to say in such situations.
Travel made no sense at all.
Except that it was Christmas.
And it was 1983.
My father had died the previous March. That summer, Connie’s father suffered a series of strokes that left him a fraction of himself. There was a very good chance that this would prove to be his last Christmas.
And that upped the emotional stakes no matter how cold it happened to be.
Still, if the car hadn’t started that morning we would have stayed put. We would have made a phone call to Connie’s mother, promising to head out to western Illinois when conditions improved.
But it started.
It shouldn’t have. I hadn’t parked it in the garage but had left it out near the street because the snowplows kept blocking our driveway.
And it wasn’t some heavy-duty SUV with four-wheel drive.
It was a Chevy Cavalier station wagon, a little four-cylinder drive-around-town vehicle perfectly suited to a family of four. Not the sort of car you want to have available when you’re about to embark on a journey of a few hundred miles in sub-zero weather.
But it started.
And because it started, emotions took over.
Though both of us doubted the wisdom of the trip, we both knew how important it was to Connie’s parents. Our twins were 6 years old that Christmas. It might be their last Christmas with their grandfather, and they’d already lost one grandfather that year.
I packed the car, though I don’t think I packed it very wisely. We took along sleeping bags for the twins to help keep them warm, but we had nothing like the kind of emergency kit that the folks on the Weather Channel always recommend these days.
The plan, such as it was, was to head out as early as we could in daylight and arrive in Jacksonville, Ill., in mid-afternoon. Normally, the trip took five and a half to six hours, depending upon traffic.
But this wasn’t a normal trip.
By the time we reached the end of the block, I knew we had made a mistake. Part of me wanted to turn back then and there, but there’s an optimism that keeps us moving forward.
Maybe the roads would be better ahead. Maybe it wouldn’t be as cold in Illinois. Maybe the sun would come out.
And maybe Santa would give us a lift on his sleigh before he headed back to the North Pole.
So we kept going, slowly, but we were going.
It wasn’t long before we started counting the abandoned vehicles by the side of the road. Semis had stopped because the diesel fuel in their fuel lines had frozen in the cold. Moving cars had suddenly been turned into ice cubes by the weather. We tried not to think about the people who had been traveling in them, folks who were probably going to spend the holiday in an emergency shelter.
We just kept going.
West of Indianapolis, the interstate was a single lane in each direction. And that lane was the shoulder. It was rough and covered with ice and snow, but it was passable. The same couldn’t be said for the usual lanes.
Somewhere around Crawfordsville, we stopped for gas. As I manned the pump, I noticed a combination of grim determination and resigned foolishness on the part of the other travelers.
It was past suppertime when we rolled into the driveway that Christmas. The trip had taken somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to 10 hours.
It qualifies for the short list of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. To this day, I shudder to think of all the things that could have gone wrong, the extent to which I’d put my family at risk.
But it was Christmas. And I’ll never forget how happy they were to see us when we arrived.[[In-content Ad]]