Yesterday I was driving back to my parents home from the eastern Arizona mountains after a great visit with old friends.
I chose the prettiest route, and when I started, the day was perfect. I settled in with one of my favorite playlists and anticipated a gorgeous drive.
The day before, I’d noticed acres of wild sunflowers in full bloom. I was particularly looking forward to stopping to photograph them for my friend Julie.
Little did I know …
I wasn’t ten miles down the road before I noticed heavy black clouds to the south. They were moving in my direction.
But … hey! I live in Alberta. I chew up adverse road conditions like Popeye eats spinach.
Before Alberta, I lived in western Washington. I am sooo not afraid of driving in a little rain!
Gloom slid over my sky, and I had to turn on my headlights. Ahead of me, I saw jagged streaks of white lightning split the clouds.
Rain began to fall: fat droplets that slammed into my windshield like gravel falling from a dump truck.
I gave up the idea of taking a picture of sunflowers. Even if I could take a photo in the dim gray, I didn’t want to risk my camera in the rain.
The rain fell harder and faster. I turned my wipers as high as they could go, but I still had to strain to see the road. I slowed down. Five miles an hour below the speed limit. Ten miles slower. Fifteen.
The droplets hitting my car sounded like bullets slamming into the body, and I wondered if a raindrop could ever shatter a windshield. Then I realized they were hard, white pellets. I pulled off the road and parked in a church parking lot until the hail let up.
I wasn’t back on the road ten minutes before I found myself in a torrential downpour. I could hardly see the road.
At one point, I hit a puddle of water in a low spot just before a bridge, and I felt my wheels lose contact with the pavement. Only for a second, but it was enough to scare me. I slowed down.
The only saving grace was that everybody slowed down, not just me. That tells you how bad it was!
Again, I pulled into a parking lot and waited for the rain to let up a little, so I could see.
I stopped for lunch in Payson. When I stopped, it wasn’t raining at all, but very soon, it was pouring again, and I was glad I wasn’t on the road. By the time I finished my wrap, the rain had let up. Grateful for traveling mercies, I got back onto the highway.
Just south of town, it began to rain harder than ever. The highway there is four lanes, limited access, and there are few places to pull off safely. And many of the pullouts and side roads are dirt or gravel.
There are ruts worn into the pavement there, and they were filled with water. If my tires slipped into them, I lost traction. Every time. I tried to straddle the ruts, but when two semi-trucks passed me in the fast lane, I had to move away from the white line between us, and each time, I lost control of my van for a split second or two.
It rained even harder, and I seriously considered taking one of the side roads. Getting stuck in the mud was considerably more attractive than getting into an accident or driving off the road because I couldn’t see.
Then I heard my phone ping, an odd sound I’d never heard before coming to Arizona this year. I glanced down at the screen to see a Flash Flood warning in my area from the National Weather Service. “Avoid flood areas,” it said. “Check local media.”
So much for taking a side road. I had no way of knowing where the flood areas were.
Instead, I slowed down even more. Twenty miles an hour below the speed limit, then twenty-five. Thirty.
The rain fell harder, and soon I could see only a tiny bit of the solid white line to my right, and only one white line on the driver’s side. At that point, I would have risked any side road. I squinted and peered through the rain, looking for an exit. For any place I could safely leave the road.
I’ve always heard that in low visibility, do not pull over to the side of the road. If you can safely exit and get clear off the road, go for it. But otherwise, you are safer to continue at a very low speed because if you pull over to the side of the road and stop, the car behind you may well follow you, thinking you are on the road.
So I slowed down even more and peeled my eyes looking both for the lines that would keep me in my lane and an exit off the highway.
Then I noticed a line of blinking red taillights in front of me. I slowed to a crawl up to the first set. It was a car, sitting on the shoulder with his hazards on. Wow, I thought. I guess he doesn’t know you aren’t supposed to stop.
I crawled past him to find another car stopped on the shoulder with his hazards on. And another and another. There were probably fifteen cars lined up on the narrow shoulder between the guard rail and the slow lane.
I began to wonder what they knew that I didn’t. Was a bridge ahead of me washed out? Maybe moving water across the road? Was I driving into a flash flood?
I debated pulling onto the shoulder with them, but the injunction not to do that was so strong that I crept along, prepared to stop at the first sign of water across the road.
Ahead of me, I saw a sheen on the road, with raindrops pinging off the standing water, but it couldn’t have been an inch deep. And there was no shoulder. I drove into the puddle.
And promptly lost control of my car. I was skimming across the surface of the water, with no traction whatsoever.
I held the steering wheel steady and waited for the tires to grip again, but they didn’t. For two or three very long seconds, I had no control.
My car is a champ, though, and just continued forward in a straight line until the tires could again grab the asphalt.
I slowed down even more and continued. I crept along — alone on the road — from the top of the Mogollon Rim to the bottom. Occasionally I caught a glimpse through the rain of the taillights of the semi-truck ahead of me, but nobody else was moving.
I was halfway from Rye to Sunflower before the rain let up even a little. Only then did I see the first break in the clouds, and loosen my clenched hands from the steering wheel.
This was the second worst white-knuckle drive I’ve ever made, second only to the time I was Baptized by Snow. I have never seen visibility so bad that drivers pulled onto the shoulder, thinking it safer to stop than to continue.
Only a few miles down the road, however, the rain stopped completely.
The clouds overhead were still ominous and gray, but in the distance, I could see them breaking up. And the road was damp rather than running water.
The last thirty miles of the drive were as lovely as I’d anticipated when I chose the route.
I suppose there is a metaphor here somewhere. A life lesson I could learn.
Something about driving the road of life. Obstacles. Losing one’s vision. Having to slow down. Feeling terrified but plodding on. Passing all the people who’ve given up and stopped by the side of the road. Light eventually breaking through. Blah blah blah.
But right now? I’m too traumatized to tease out the message.
Tags: Driving in rain
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