On Frozen Blog

Pepper got us primo ducats for Caps-Leafs on a December Saturday night in Toronto, OPEC’s made such a voyage economical, and I wanted a fresh visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame, and so early yesterday I gassed up the Jeep and headed North. It was a drive through premature winter I’ll be talking about 20 years from now.

I love taking Interstate 68 West up through the highest elevations in Maryland, and avoiding the onslaught of 18-wheelers in the tight confines of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I also suspected that evidence of winter would already be on display in Cumberland and Allegheny counties. It was.

Intermittently I drove through Western Maryland amid brilliant sunshine glimmering down on fresh, landscape-covering snow and wondrous snowglobe-like bursts of winter fury that made for an uplifting backdrop to some Christmas music playing in my Jeep.

The serious fun began as I approached Erie, Pa. Some 25 miles south of it I noticed deep fresh snow for the first time this holiday season. Still, my roads were dry and clear — absolutely ideal driving conditions, gorgeous and winter vibrant, and precisely what I’d have ordered en route to my weekend getaway to renew my vows with hockey. 

There seems to me to be a nexus between northern American communities who’ve long hosted hockey and FM radio outlets specializing in big-hair hard rock. I don’t recall the call letters of the delightful radio landing I made in and about Erie, but suffering as I long have with DC-101’s 40-track, ever uninspired rut of a rotation, the station never venturing really into what I call tunes to take a warmup skate to, I was an air-drumming sight to behold as Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” serenaded me as I moved East toward Buffalo.

About driving around Buffalo after Veteran’s Day: Beware! My first trouble sign was a malevolent-looking black sky near 4:00 — too early to be getting so dark by a solid hour. Big snowflakes started to pelt my windshield, and I noticed that they were beginning to whiten my road for the first time in the journey. I have 4-wheel drive if I need it, but I need to manually engage it while in idle. Fifteen minutes later I was in total whiteout conditions — I couldn’t see 25 feet in front of me, and on the west-bound section of I-90 I could make out only flashlight-sized specks of headlights from cars wisely leaving Buffalo.

I found little information about the conditions on the radio; to me the world was ending, but apparently to Buffaloans nothing odd was happening in their region. Meanwhile, 4-wheel-drive SUVs much larger than my Jeep were navigating the winter tumult at 5 miles per hour on a 65 miles per hour highway. From my cell phone I rang my father merely to hear a voice of comfort, knowing that he’d made his share of winter drives way up North. He urged me to pull off at the nearest exit, find a service station, get my wipers clean (ice was fast forming on them, rendering them useless), and by all means get in 4-wheel drive. Problem was, visibility was so poor drivers were powerless to identify anything in front of them — where exactly the road was distinguished from shoulders, gulches, the median. Truly I had no way of identifying exit ramps, and all signs and road markings were lost in the fury.

I was simultaneously frightened and intoxicated by my extreme environment. You really feel alive (and supremely vulnerable) when Mother Nature in winter dramatically decides that humanity really should cease its common comings and goings.

Meanwhile, Pepper was peppering my Blackberry with Friday night dinner ideas in downtown Toronto. He was flying in from New York  — probably enjoying in-flight cocktails while I mentally wrote my will.

How many cars could I make out having slid off the highway and into weekend-ruining stops in ditches? I’d estimate perhaps 20. That was over maybe a 20-mile stretch of I-90.

Some 120 minutes into the blizzard, during which I covered no more than 25 miles toward Buffalo, I noticed a tailing off of the snow — the wrath of the wicked snow band at last relenting — and I could actually see the beginnings of black road welcoming my snow-crusted tires. I’d survived — barely.  

Amazingly, as I moved past downtown Buffalo and entered Canada there wasn’t a snowflake to be found.       

I’m lodged this weekend at the Fairmont Royal York, which is a hard sand wedge from the Air Canada Centre and just a couple of blocks from the Hockey Hall of Fame. I pulled into its car dropoff area near 8:00 last night and at last had my feet out on dry terra firma. My Jeep looked as if it had just navigated the Iditarod. No other cars in downtown Toronto looked like mine. An exceedingly courteous and welcoming valet asked me where I’d come from.

“White death,” I replied.

Fifteen minutes later, inside at the Fairmont’s lounge, a bartender poured me a 20-ounce draft of Alexander Keith’s. Under normal circumstances that’s the best-tasting beer in the world, in my humble opinion. Last night’s 20 ounces were the favorite of my traveling life.