Whiteout

by Sheldon Birnie

You could hardly see the road the way the snow was coming down. If that wasn’t enough, the wind kept blowing it up and about and all over so that you could hardly see a thing past the hood of my old Dodge Ram. Not a goddamn thing. Just a pure king hell white knuckle whiteout the whole goddamn way home.

It was Boxing Day, and we’d been up the Interlake to visit the inlaws — my wife’s folks, brother, sisters, a couple cousins. The whole deal. Christmas had been great, lotsa laughs, great food from sunup to sundown. No fights. Nothing serious, anyway. Kids got spoiled and the adults got into the holiday spirit. Everybody stayed up late, and before everyone went to bed, grandpa pulled on his Sorels and shot off some fireworks down by the lake. Red, green, and white explosions battling the cosmos for attention, lighting up the moonless night above the snow covered hard water. 

Everybody slept in. Then we all ate a big old brunch, full of leftovers and fresh bacon and sausage and cheeses and fruit we forgot to put out the day before. Clouds had rolled in overnight, forecast calling for a big old dump of snow. I didn’t pay it too much mind, wanting to get back into the city before dark anyhow. But we dilly-dallied a wee bit too long, and sure enough, before we’re even packed up to go, she was blowing something fierce.

Normally, she’s about a two hour drive south back to our place from the inlaws lakehouse, door-to-door, but I knew that given the conditions we’d be looking at a considerably longer trek. Guaranteed. Even though she was already drifting pretty good by the time we left, the old Dodge trucked along the farm roads to the highway without trouble. Once we hit that hardtop two lane, though, things slowed right down. I thanked my lucky stars the kids had their videogames and headphones on in back and I wasn’t too hungover. Otherwise I mighta just turned right the hell around then and there.

The wife, she kept chatting away as we drove on down the road, about the festivities and the gossip from her sisters and what all we were gonna get up to between then and New Year’s and the shows her cousin told her we totally had to watch already. Meanwhile, the wipers are shovelling the snow around on the windshield but not really helping much. I was able to get the truck up to about 60, but any more than that and she started drifting, even with all the weight in her and the winter tires and all. So I kept going at that decent little clip, doing the math on how it’d take us maybe an extra hour at that rate. Not so bad, I figured. 

Of course, conditions just got worse and worse from there. 

Wasn’t long before I’d slowed down to 50, then 40, visibility dropping so as driving through this blizzard was akin to barreling through TV static, back when that was a thing. Couldn’t see shit. Occasionally, I’d catch a flash of the shoulder markers as we whizzed on by, confirming we were still pointed in the right direction. I’m hunched over the wheel, barely grunting a reply when the wife asks me anything until finally she realizes we’re in the thick of a bad one here. Then she goes, You want me to leave you alone, hun? 

Yes please, I say, knuckles gripping that wheel tight. She shuts off the radio, pulls her earbuds outta her purse and plugs ‘em into her phone, dialling up one of her podcasts. Thanks, dear, I go, even though by now she can’t hear me. Or pretends she can’t. Either way, that’s OK. The road is all that matters, the goddamn road and the goddamn snow and getting the four of us off of it and out of it and home safe and sound.

This wasn’t the first whiteout I’d been behind the wheel for, mind. Hell no. You live up here, you get used to ‘em. But that don’t mean they’re ever any fun. Even as a kid, my dad driving us across the prairies for a hockey tourney or to visit grandparents or aunts and uncles in one small town or other, that wind would whip the snow up into an impenetrable veil. More than once, sitting in the backseat, I’d just scrunch up my eyes, tuck my head into the corner, and hope we made it out the other side alive. This one here was turning out to be doozy, let me tell ya, and it wasn’t getting any easier, what with the light draining from the sky by the minute. No sir.

Tense shoulders hunched over the wheel, I kept my foot steady on the gas. Not only did I need to keep us on the road, but also avoid slamming into anyone who might be pulled over on the shoulder, trying to wait out the worst of it — or else just got themselves plain old stuck. The animals, at least, had the good sense to hunker down where they could and let the storm blow itself out before bothering to forage for food or whatever it is that draws them to the roadways and, like as not, a grisly demise.

Good weather or bad, it makes no difference — the highway takes plenty of lives. Everybody’s lost someone to the road. Driving through the shit, the faces of those I’ve known who died on the road flashed through my mind. Brendan. Olivia. Phile. A buddy’s puppy that had run off out of his hands, no leash, crushed and tossed in the ditch like a candy wrapper by a passing semi on a truck route just outside of town. I try and shut those images out. But it ain’t easy.

We’d only passed a couple trucks heading north, and hadn’t seen another set of lights headed our way since we left the little hamlet the inlaws call home, now that they’re retired. That was good, less chance of a collision. Then again, if we slid off the road, there might not be anyone by to help for some time. Sure, I had an emergency kit under the passenger seat, and we had blankets and more in the box, but it was cold out and growing colder and the prospect of the four of us spending a night shivering together did not sound appealing in the least.

So we kept on, slower and steadier as the day drained from the sky, that faint dimelike outline of the sun finally disappearing behind the aspen and the pine that lined the road, black filling in around everything but the white blur the headlights cut through the darkness.

Anyone who’s ever driven the highway this far north knows that things can get squirrely at night when the snow is blowing. Your eyes play tricks on you, the swirling snow making faces that disappear just as quick, or beckoning tendrils flickering out from the depths beyond the cone of illumination cast before you as you plow along the road. There’s no telling what the mind will conjure, what your subconscious has been itching to push up to the surface, once you’re locked into that driver’s seat, snow pouring down, tracing innumerable patterns across your tired retinas.

Same goes for sound. Unless you’ve got the radio blasting something loud and insistent, which in and of itself can be distracting, the sound of the wipers, the wind howling over the cab and through any crack or hole you might have in the seal can sound like someone calling to you from beyond the grave. Someone just out of sight whispering, shrieking, moaning your name.

So it was this evening. Only this time, I had the holidays on my mind. I’d been thinking of those who were no longer with us. Grandparents, friends, my own father. Seasonal spectres come to shake and startle my spirit towards some sort of reckoning. At one point or other during that long stretch coming down from the Interlake until we hit the lights of the city, they were all talking at me, cajoling, needling, making pleas. I knew their words were ones I’d stored away in a back closet of my mind, suppressed during waking hours, but come waltzing back into my mind now that the snow had beat down that barrier with its insistent battering of my windshield.

I’d blink my eyes, shake my head. The visions, the whispers would clear, only to come creeping back in again. 

My grandmother, tsk tsking through the kitchen; grandfather laughing from his chair in the corner. An old hockey buddy, dead these many years, smiling, his blue eyes twinkling as he asks, How she goin’, pal? Been missin’ ya bud. Big time. The many words I’d never get to share with my father, whisked away on the breeze, white frozen fingers calling to me to follow.

Now and then I’d crank the window open beside me, to let a blast of frigid air into the cab, to keep me from falling into the lull of sleep that can threaten under such circumstances. Snow would come flying in, too, but I paid it no mind. Trapped, it would melt in short order, each crystalline form never to be repeated. I had a large cup of coffee within reach, which I helped myself to when I could spare the hand on the wheel. But caffeine can only do so much against the hypnotic sway of a blizzard at night on the highway, waiting until it was time finally for me to lay my down to rest to make itself known, pumping that blood through its circuit, to keep the thoughts swirling through my weary mind.

Honey, I went, more than once, hoping she’d humour me with some more stories, or at least find some suitable distraction on the radio dial. But she was fast asleep, face pressed into a balled up sweater against the passenger side window. The kids, in back, both sawing logs, too. I hoped all their dreams were sweet ones, if they dreamt at all. I’d have to suffer through the bad ones, the waking ones, on my own and hope to make it out the other side. 

We all do in the end, though, don’t we? 

The worst stretch, after already being on the road three godawful long hours, came just after the double-lane spread out into four separated lanes as we started closing in on the city. Usually, by that point, we’re 20 minutes out, half an hour if the Sunday night traffic’s bad and construction’s bottle necking everything up further in. But we had to crawl through the snow for another hour before we passed the perimeter. Plus, with the added empty space between woods on either side of the road, the whiteout only worsened, punctuated only ever so often by a ghost of a green highway sign noting or a skeletal light-pole illuminating a drifted over exit to the right. 

We passed first one truck in the ditch, a big boy, flagged for safety, the driver no doubt up in his cab, waiting out the weather, then another and another, then a car and a pickup and another. I didn’t even think of stopping to lend a hand, figuring I might not get going again for a good while if I did.

Despite the chill I kept inviting into the cab to keep my wits about me, I was sweating something fierce, what with the effort it took to keep the truck between the ditches and my mind from running completely off the rails. I kept myself half-sane by imagining how I’d fire the hot tub off the back deck up, once we’d gotten home, and how I’d soak the chills away once the kids were tucked into bed, breathing in and out real slow all the while, hammering my left heel against the floorboards insistently. As though it all depended on that steady rhythm remaining uninterrupted. As though such actions had any true impact at all in that big, empty world beyond the cab.

The wind picked up about then, too, unbuffered as it was on either side of the highway, rocking the truck in waves, the road beneath the snow slick with ice. My mind kept running that loop of personal failures on repeat. Times I’d been needlessly harsh with the children. Times I’d failed to stick up for a friend. Or worse yet, myself. Still, those thoughts were almost welcome, compared to what was playing out before my eyes 

The view through the windshield had become a theatre of the absurd, as more strange visions emerged from the negative space between the snowflakes and my subconscious. A rabbit ripped apart by some beastly bird, an ancient carrion crow of monstrous proportions, before training its black eye on my own. Wriggling bone white tentacles, or worms, or snakes, or whatever they were, roiling over and around each other, pushing ever inward. Pushing towards me. Shadow creatures pulsing, massing and dispersing, out from the void to swarm the windshield, retreating at the last second only to regroup and do it all over again.

Nameless spectres of horrors yet to come. 

All these and more fired past my eyeballs upon that dismal stretch of road, only to fade away and reappear yet again as an image fades in and out from an old TV screen struggling to pull in reception. 

You and I both know these things you see when you’re in it, they aren’t there. Never were, never will be. All that’s there is you, the wheel clutched beneath your cold, sweaty hands, your ride, the snow and the road. There is nowhere then, only the need to keep moving forward. The voices, the sounds from the void, they aren’t there either. Not really — not that knowing so makes them any easier to plow through. It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is to keep moving. To stay on the road, to keep moving through it, to push right past it, inching towards your destination.  Otherwise, you’re a goner, bud.

Sure enough, we made it home fine that evening, four hours and some change after we set out from the in-laws place by the lake there. The kids didn’t even notice the harried state I was in when we pulled into the driveway, just grabbed their stuff and tumbled into their bedrooms to fire up bigger screens than the ones they’d been glued to over the past couple days. My wife, she knew it had been a hard drive, that I was beat and then some. But she was tired and groggy herself from the long ride, and kept telling herself she had the house to set back in order.

True to the promise I’d made myself, I rolled a little number, poured a couple fingers of good scotch over ice and pulled on a pair of swim trunks after clearing off and firing up the hot tub. When she was good and steaming, the kids safely tucked away in their rooms, I soaked myself good and proper. It felt good, I won’t lie. But still, when I’d lay my head back and look up at the sky, there was still snow pouring down without end. It was beautiful, sure. But all it did was bring me back, again and again, to that harrowing drive. 

As though it had never ended. As though I were driving still.

When I closed my eyes, it was worse. Gone was the snow, the beautiful fluffy flakes, each unique and only once for this world. Instead, the space between my eyes and eyelids filled with the darkness between the puffy white snowflakes. The negative space of the void, and all that came with it. Tired, beat as I was, I knew I’d have a hell of time sleeping that night. Just a hell of a time. 

Buddy, I wasn’t wrong.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beer league hockey player in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand.