- Thinkstock
- Don’t be frightened!
I thought I moved back to the west coast to avoid having to drive in the snow, but joke’s on me, I guess! And that’s my first tip when it comes to snow-driving: Don’t! Make like the alarmist figure in this classic installment of the Oatmeal. Stay home, make yourself a pot of soothing Cold Care tea, and watch Making a Murderer on Netflix so we can talk about it later. Don’t go outside!
If, like me, you absolutely HAVE to drive today, here’s PBOT’s map of snow and ice routes in Portland.
Adequate Man—purveyor of helpful laundry tips—also has a great guide to snow-driving for the uninitiated, “How To Drive In The Snow, In A Regular-Ass Car, Without Freaking Out.” Just reading it will probably make you feel better:
Which brings me to the first thing you need to know in order to drive the hell home in the snow: You are not actually required to lose your goddamn mind just because snow is falling…
Accordingly, driving a car home in the snow is still driving a car. This probably seems like snarky, unhelpful advice, but actually it’s not! Many drivers seem genuinely to believe that, when the road has snow on it, using an automobile to get from one place to another becomes a fundamentally different activity, with weird obscure properties that you don’t know, and so you creep along at two miles-per-hour with the brake pedal halfway depressed the entire time and, like, your goddamn hazard lights on, gripping the wheel in white-knuckled terror, as though at any minute, for no reason whatsoever, your car might decide to hang a 90-degree left turn and plunge into a ravine.
Are women even allowed to read Adequate Man? Who cares!
Meanwhile, here’s some advice from my dad, a native New Englander who’s been carting his fraidy-cat Pacific Northwest family through the ice and snow for decades without complaint: “Take major routes. Leave early so you don’t hit iced up roads. Just go carefully and only brake if you have to. Less skidding that way.”
Better advice, convince politicians to follow the example of Germany and other countries and SALT THE DAMMED ROADS.
We don’t get this ice here enough to really hurt streams and trees by salting (and you know those Germans are even more crazy for their trees than we are) and you also ain’t paying anyone to clean up all the gravel that got put on the road, causing all kinds of cracked windows either.
It is safer, and makes sense.
I grew up here and its not that hard to drive in snowy weather if you are skilled. . Have people gotten wimpier and soft? They get all anxious when its starts snowing and they have to deal with..gasp!!… a foot of snow, oh my lets close the schools down for an inch! I remember as a kid hiking through 2 feet of snow to the bus stop for school. They didn’t close schools for snow days back in the 70s and 80s. If anything they may have had half days, where schools let out early. We actually had more snowy blizzard days back then. Not the lite stuff that’s common now, due to global warming patterns. I was taught to drive in snowy weather by my dad who grew up in North Dakota. The news media also aids and abets with the mass hysteria regarding a little bit of snow. Gosh, one would think the world was coming to an end.
As for not salting the roads, its an Oregon environmentalist tradition, like recycling, and Oregonians want to keep it that way, to protect our watersheds from contaminants. Although ODOT will implement salting in dire weather , as per 2012 policy change, its a last resort measure reserved for extreme icy conditions on major arterial highways. . As for Portland city proper, salting is verboten due to corrosive effects on bridges etc…Also , this is one reason why vintage cars last longer here, and out of state collectors love Oregon plated classic cars, since they aren’t so corroded by salted roads.