John McLoone

I thought you were supposed to get wiser as you get older.

I think I’m getting dumber by the decade.

For days last week, weather alerts were popping up on my mobile device alerting me of bad weather for the weekend.

It was going to be some rain. It was going to be some ice. It was going to be some snow.

But, then again, it could have been not much of anything. Our residence was on the line of bad weather and worse weather. The meteorologists, however, were talking about how hard the weekend weather was to predict. There were fronts down here on the map and pressure over here. You know what that means? They probably don’t either, because the forecast for Friday was either a high temperature in the 50s or in the 70s. Sometimes, it seems they’re in the forecast center just covering all bases.

That’s kind of what I though with Sunday afternoon’s chance of showers, ice and/or snow.

We had been received an invitation from a family member for an early dinner. We carefully eyed the conditions. The temperature was in the mid 30s, and there was a light rain. I deduced that we could make it, but we should get going.

When we travel, my wife generally handles driving duties. She’s paying attention to everything around the vehicle even if she isn’t driving. As a passenger, I am not a good navigator. I can read or catch up on the day’s events on my phone. If there’s a threat of bad weather, she turns over the keys to me, and that was the case for this journey.

It started out just fine. A little rain that turned into more rain. The wipers were doing their job and the highway traffic was moving at highway traffic speeds.

I was perhaps lulled into a false sense of security in my abilities to handle whatever Mother Nature throws at me. I’ve spent days and days delivering newspapers to post offices in the dead of the night, making the first tracks in the highway snow. This rain was nothing. Until it was. About 20 miles from home, I set out to pass another vehicle. In the process. The wet pavement instantly turned into a sheet of ice, just like that. We were for about a quarter mile, kind of floating on that piece of ice. The first cars were in the ditch. We kept from joining them. I don’t really know how. Traffic had slowed, and the highway was blocked over an interchange. We took the first exit we could find and made our slow way home.

I realized I was dumb to doubt the forecasters. I thought they were covering all their bases with a forecast that included multiple meteorological events. “It could rain. It could stay warm. It could get cold. It could turn to ice. It could snow.” In about 15 minutes, it did it all.

And we were able to stay out of the ditch to tell the story.