Winter is wonderful.  I think I first realized it once I learned to drive.  Somewhere in the process of hunching forward trying to see out the very bottom of the windshield where the slow-to-work defroster had only begun to remove the inch-thick ice, and all this while barreling down a slippery highway at seventy miles an hour, I decided that winter is a season with its own special charms.

            Take, for instance, the older gentleman two streets over from my house.  If it snows during the night (when all sane people are sleeping) he fancies himself a reborn Paul Revere; pushing his five-hundred horsepower snow-blower back and forth across his postage-stamp-sized driveway at five a.m. as if to say, “There, you little snowflakes!  Land on MY property under the cloak of darkness, will ya!?” all the while alerting the rest of us slumbering and unsuspecting neighbors to the imminent danger.

            Clearing driveways is child’s play, however, when compared to the theatrics that develop on the roadways during winter.  There’s a whole army of volunteer accident causers who immediately flock to the roads and highways to drive slowly in the left lane and brake suddenly for emergencies like clouds and distant oxygen.  The more accomplished among this class can be found spun backwards in ditches with their lights still on and dumb looks on their faces as if to say, “how’d I get here!?”  These traits are most dominant in the first snow fall of the year when half the population behaves as if they have never seen snow before.

            Even more noteworthy, however, are the trained professionals that can be recognized by the official looking orange or yellow trucks they drive called ‘plows’.  This term is derived from what they do to you if you attempt to drive near them.  Plow drivers are also especially adept at spraying slush and snow at high velocities directly onto your windshield for sustained periods of time, or driving down the middle of two lanes and backing traffic up for miles.  They are also among the best in the world at sitting in the median of highways and doing absolutely nothing.

            And if the volunteer and professionals aren’t enough, there are the four-wheel-drivers to consider.  This is a species very peculiar in its total lack of understanding of physics.  Because all four (usually oversized) tires are powered or ‘driven’, the vehicles of choice in the four-wheeler crowd have remarkable abilities of self-propulsion, even in snow and ice.  This mobility breeds an immediate overconfidence in the driver who quickly forgets that such performance is due his equipment and not his innate driving skills.  Having forgotten this, he then assumes his braking performance will match his mobility: an erroneous conclusion commonly resulting in the transformation of a heavy off-road truck into a battering ram (an observation, no doubt, made by Dodge and resulting in the naming of their ‘Ram’ trucks).  This is further complicated by the fact that most owners of four wheel drive trucks feel compelled to affix enormous and attractive sharp snow plows to the front of their vehicles.  These enhancements lead to even more effective metal working when contacting smaller cars at the precise moment the four wheel driver realizes the deficiencies of his braking.* 

            Many additional driving characteristics can be witnessed during a snow storm.  There are those that decide to drive safely by slowing down seven and a half miles before their turn, causing everybody behind them to slam on their brakes, slide out of control, and end up in the ditch just to avoid them.  Others decide that since there is a quarter inch of snow on the ground, it is suddenly acceptable to drive down the center of the road, whereby subsequent motorists, spotting these tracks, decide to follow in the same path until the whole county has been transformed into single-lane one-way streets.  Still others can be found driving cars with snow stacked two feet deep on hoods and trunks and windows, apparently for the purpose of transporting said snow from Point A to Point B (two towns which, mysteriously, have never been found on any map).  But the most notorious of winter driving offenders is the famed ‘pull-out-in-front-of-you’ driver.  This person waits until you are just a few feet away before driving directly into your path, no doubt assuming you have the stopping power of four-wheel-drivers.  If through some fait-accompli of miraculous driving skill, luck, and destiny you are able to avoid slamming into the offender head first, you will receive an angry look as if to say, “Why so reckless?  Can’t you see it’s slippery out here?”

            So after twenty-some years of enduring these winter hardships, I did the only sane thing.  I moved to Florida where everyone drives safely!  (And if you believe that, you’ve obviously never been there!)

* Because of this effectiveness, there are certain neighborhoods of a rural nature where snow plows are left on trucks all year long in honor of the ‘glory days’ of winter.