Diana McCaulay, Contributor
DRIVING north at night with two fellow students, America scrolls by, strip mall after strip mall, fast food restaurants, warehouses, enormous furniture shops. Who buys all this stuff, I wonder. The hours unroll and the malls and signs disappear. Soon there are very few other cars, most of the vehicles abroad this late are huge trucks, passing us with their banks of wheels hissing.
It begins to snow, lightly at first. Then it thickens, snow comes straight at us in big flakes. The road turns from black to white. The car feels like it's floating. "When do you stop driving in the snow?" I ask, thinking there must come a point when it's too risky. I mean, when does snow become a blizzard?
"Oh, pretty much when you get wherever you're going," says one of my colleagues. Not the answer I was hoping for.
Eventually I close my eyes. Staring into the black and white night will not keep the car on the road. There's no way to rethink this journey, to start again, to be back in my apartment, half-watching a TV report of snow in the mountains. We are too far from anywhere, the turn off to the last town is an hour behind us. It was so sudden, I think, the transformation from America-the-crowded to the wilds of Canada, this place of hulking mountains with an empty road piercing a threatening night.
I fall asleep and wake up when the car skids madly across the road. "I knew it!" I say out loud and I HAD known it, I'd known the snow would Get Us.
The car spins. Might I not survive this night, will the world go on without me, will I not be able to finish the things I've started? A looming wall fills the windscreen and we head straight for it. I wait for the crash and the crumpling, but instead, we're airborne and then landing, but softly, with a fluffy noise. There's a deep, white silence.
"Is everyone OK?" we ask each other. We're unhurt. We've landed in a snow-filled ditch at the side of the road.
We can only open one of the car doors. We scramble for jackets and hats and gloves, being Jamaican, my hat is inaccessible in my bag. We struggle out of the car up onto the road, the three of us and the snow, me thinking, NOW what?
Survive
In Jamaica, if you survive a car accident the first people on the scene could offer to help, or they could hurt you, intentionally (with weapons) or negligently (by hauling you feet first out of your vehicle). In the north, the weather could kill you. If no car comes along, if you don't have warm enough clothes, you could die. I remember reading that in such circumstances, you shouldn't leave the car. "We musn't leave the car," I tell my companions. They don't say anything, but something in their body language suggests they're thinking: DUH--
Then we see a flashing yellow light, high off the road. It's a snow plough, keeping the road clear so crazy people can drive on it. The driver looks out, checks if we're okay and says he's radioed for a tow truck. It'll be along in half an hour. I'm suddenly, passionately grateful to be in Canada. Help is on the way.
We wait in the car, the windows fogging up. It's still snowing and I wonder if the tow truck will be able to see us. I feel drowsy and wonder about delayed shock and rising carbon dioxide levels in the car.
I couldn't adapt to this climate, I think suddenly. My genes are warm-weather genes. They understand heat, they're coded for tropical cataclysms; hurricanes, earthquakes. My skin can handle sunburn and mosquito bites. Snowstorms are just too foreign. The tow truck comes and pulls the car out of the drift. Miraculously, it's undamaged and we drive on. This time I do not sleep; I will keep the car on the road by virtue of my full attention.
I'm writing this in longhand, warm and safe in a condo in Canada. The temperature outside is 20 degrees F, the snow swirls and dances. The sky is grey and low, cutting off the tops of the mountains. A man scrapes snow off his car in the driveway.
Me, I'm wearing a sweat suit and socks, sitting beside a fire, drinking hot chocolate, looking through a plate-glass window over the snow-covered roofs of houses, through evergreens so laden with snow they look like they've got dreadlocks. In Jamaica, mostly I want to be outside. Here outside could kill you. I think of sunsets over Mona Reservoir, when I'd shiver and say it was cold when the temperature was maybe 78 degrees F. I think of the polar bears in circus cages, touring the Caribbean, way out of their element, as I am here in the snow. And I know for sure I'm a guango tree, not an evergreen.
On the morning we leave, the sun comes out and illuminates the falling snow. The flakes are dazzling, like golden glitter, beautiful in their northern way.
