854 Miles to Beat The Bomb Cyclone Blizzard
Bamboozled to near-insanity by Big Weather
The man behind the counter in the liquor store in the town closer to the North Pole than the equator looked at my ID, then looked at me, and then back at the ID, and then back at me. “Los Angeles… What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
A valid question. Outside it was -4 degrees and the snow was picking up. The trees bowed under weight of the snow that had already fallen. It was 3:40 pm and nearly dark. Small piles of snow from outside melted into salty dirtwater in front of shelves containing a library of Budweiser products in packs of 24, varities of Bud Lite I’d never even seen before. I felt like I was in the first act of a Hallmark Holiday movie, except my parents don’t own a bakery or charming bed & breakfast, I wasn’t wearing inappropriate footwear, and my car wasn’t broken down outside and it turned out that the only guy who could fix it just so happened to be the guy I broke up with when I went away to The Big City for college. I was just there to buy beer.
I told the incredulous cashier that we’d driven from Austin to Minneapolis in two days, but apparently his question was rhetorical; he didn’t seem to care about the answer. I wondered how he would have reacted if I noticed his Wisconsin plates in Southern California when the sky was choked with wildfire smoke and demanded to know what the hell he was doing there. (In the years since I’ve left, the place where I grew up has unfortunately developed some real January 6th energy.)
So here’s the story of how we ended up turning a conservative three-day driving schedule into a one day south-to-north Cannonball Run, and why I’ll hold a grudge against The Weather Channel for a long time.
On Monday, we pulled into Hot Springs, Arkansas. Our plan (lol— “plan”) was to enjoy a day of people-free relaxation before our final push up through Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota and several days with the family. Hot Springs was a little out of the way, but it’s a nice town to visit, the Ozarks are beautiful, and we booked a cabin that was both luxurious and hilarious in its commitment to the theme of “elevated hillbilly.” (Seriously, I can’t say enough about how great this place was.)
But alas, our day of R&R beneath the watch of ironic beam-mounted taxidermy was not to be, for the minute we pulled in, we started getting worried text messages from my parents. Weather forecasters were saying that a generational winter weather event was about to whallop the Great Plains and Great Lakes in two days, just in time to throw an icy wrench into holiday travel plans. My mother was nearly in tears. My dad was trying to play it cool but I could tell they’d both been looking forward to having all three of their kids and their kids’ families in the house for Christmas for months.
I pulled up some local weather reports. Midwestern meterologists from Kansas City to Rochester, Minnesota were talking about the potential weather catastrophe in a way that seemed mildly sexually aroused. That’s how you know it’s serious— when the weatherman in Ames, Iowa has the swagger of a lowly sidekick who has been elevated to the most important person in the newsroom. The cymbals player during the finale of 1812 Overture.
We hadn’t even fully unpacked into the “Hillbilly Hiltin” cabin before we decided that the only way that we’d be certain we’d make it to my parents’ house for Christmas was to drive the entire way to Minneapolis the next day (Tuesday). All 854 miles of it. All fourteen hours of it. I’m of the kind of cheerfully stubborn midwestern stock that believes that it’s possible to show the weather who’s boss by doing things like dressing for spring in March or driving with the windows down when it’s 35 degrees outside, but I don’t fuck with driving in blizzard conditions.
So the next morning, we loaded the car over the protests of Juniper (who, justifiably, was bored of car rides) and headed out on what would turn out to be the longest single day of travel we’d embarked on together since that time we’d driven from northwestern Wisconsin to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in one day. And this time we had a baby.
Parenting is often an exercise in letting go of what you hoped would work in the service of what actually works. Parenting in a car for fourteen-plus hours is that principle on steroids.
Our only goal for Tuesday was to end the day in Minneapolis, come hell or high water. No matter how many breaks we needed to take, no matter how many times in a row we needed to play “Baby Shark” on the car stereo, no matter how many yogurt treats she needed to be fed, no matter how much Bluey the baby needed to watch. We’re a low screen time family, but we’re also a “try to get her to stop screaming” family.
It ended up taking us 16 hours door-to-door, including breaks to obtain an appropriate winter coat for the baby outside of Joplin, Missouri, a stop at a Culver’s north of Kansas City where Juniper gnawed on a grilled cheese sandwich, stops for gas and multiple stops for bad gas station coffee (in our house, we call it a “crappuccino”), the most disgusting bathroom I’d ever seen *including what I’ve seen at trailheads in national parks* at a gas station that also sold live minnows in northern Arkansas.
But we carried on. Every time we crossed a state line, it felt like a merit badge. Roadside signs warning drivers that a WINTER STORM with BLIZZARD CONDITIONS was surely coming within the 24 hours urged us on. “STAY OFF THE ROADS.” “IOWA DOT: DANGEROUS CONDITIONS STARTING AT 9 AM TOMORROW” “DANGEROUS DRIVING CONDITIONS STARTING WEDNESDAY.”
By the time we crossed the border into Minnesota and it was clear that our goal was within reach, I took on the air of Cruella De Ville during the climax of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. We were going to make it. Nothing was going to stop us.
Here’s me. / Screengrab (Walt Disney Pictures)
By the time we got to the hotel in Minneapolis, we were almost delerious with achievement. We felt like we’d won the Iditarod. Both Juniper and the dog were allowed to have Cheetos. We all slept in an enormous Cheeto dust-smeared bed. All we needed to do the next morning was drive the 60 or so miles to my parents’ house, and we’d get there in time to hunker down before this promised storm came.
But it never did.
On Wednesday afternoon and evening— the day I went to “town”— the wind picked up and it snowed a bit, but the roads weren’t slippery and visibility was fine. There was some snowfall that night, but the skies were clear the next morning. The school where my mother works closed out of an abundance of caution on Thursday and Friday. It was sunny all day long, and the wind was relatively calm. The only thing out of the ordinary about the weather was that it’s a lot colder than it usually is this time of year.
If we had stuck to our original plan of only tackling 4 or 5 hours of driving per day, we still would have made it to my family holiday gathering without hitting the “storm.” We also probably could have avoided some of the more nerve-fraying moments of our 16 hour day. Better safe than sorry, of course, but we completely changed our plans and drove ourselves to the brink of insanity over weather forecasts that assured us of imminent danger.
I have a bone to pick with Big Weather. They should be in the business of providing accurate information that is helpful to the public, but I think they’re actually in the business of scaring old people into texting their kids about taking unnecessary precautions. It’s in the Weather Channel’s interest to hype its own indispensibility, and by doing that, they have to keep their audience afraid. They’re like Fox News in that way, except they’ve yet to inspire a treasonous riot. (So far!) If Big Weather isn’t careful, people will stop trusting it, and when there’s an actual weather emergency at hand, nobody will believe them.
But that’s a ways off. For now I’m sitting at a dining room table in the house where I grew up, two days earlier than I’d planned. It’s too cold to go outside. And the local meteorologist is promising that tonight is the night that things are going to get dangerous.
At least my parents are happy.