Holiday Travel, Part 1

The holidays draw families together, but sometimes, the traveling doesn’t always end up the way you plan.

In 1983, I was stationed at Fort Ord in California, doing Army support.  A guy in the same unit, John Jarrell, was also from Tennessee, so we decided to take leave over Christmas and drive back there.  I was going to take Doug and Amy back with me.

So, I got a roof rack for my car, loaded it full of our stuff, and headed off to Tennessee.  The plan was for John and I to take turns driving and we could drive straight through.  You would think since he and I worked in a weather station we would at least take a peek at what the conditions were going to be, right?  Well, we didn’t.

We did okay the first day and night and just before sunrise, we were approaching Oklahoma City, OK.  Since we needed gas, I told John to take the next exit and I would drive after we gassed up.  There had been a very light snow falling for a while, but it was a dry snow and not sticking to the ground at all, plus the wind was keeping the road clear.

Our first clue that something was wrong was when we pulled up to the gas station.  It was a full service station, but the guy inside made no move to come out and pump the gas, so I jumped out into wind that had to be close to 50mph, and was keeping the wind chill down in the single digits.

After gassing up, I pulled back out onto the road and I drove about 40mph through Oklahoma City.  It was snowing harder but still not sticking to the road.  About 20 miles east of Oklahoma City I felt the road ice up and lightly tapped my brake to slow down.  That was a mistake.  The car went into a skid and turned completely around in the middle of the road.  I recall looking at the berm coming closer out of my side of the car and hoping the weight in the carrier didn’t flip the car when we hit the shoulder. 

We lucked out and the car went off the road tail end first and stopped 3-4 feet off the pavement.  Amy was crying in the back, begging me to go back to California, but I intended to go on.  I wasn’t overly thrilled about it myself, but I was less thrilled about turning around.

Our luck held up as a state maintenance truck pulled up within a minute or two after the slide.  The two men in the truck helped me and John push the car back out onto the interstate.  One of the guys said, “It’s ice like this all the way through Arkansas.”  We would no longer be driving at 40mph.

We drove the rest of the way to Memphis at 15 to 20mph, depending on the road conditions.  It was about 8am when we ran off the road and it was almost 11pm when we got to Memphis.  As bad as the day had been, we still enjoyed the light show as we approached Memphis.  A thunderstorm was in progress over the city and the lightening reflected in multiple colors through the freezing rain/snow mix.

The rest of our trip was peaceful in comparison.