Snow Trippin'

 

by Pa Rock

Road Warrior

Rosie and I had been planning a road trip to Northwest Arkansas and Southwest Missouri for the past several weeks to attend a large family gathering, but what we had not anticipated was waking up to around two inches of snow on the ground yesterday morning as we were preparing to hit the road.    Alexa had warned us that it would be cold, but she had not mentioned even a possibility of snow - yet there it was.  There was just enough ice under the snow on the car windows to make cleaning them a tedious process which put us on the road fifteen minutes behind schedule.

But we persisted and made it to my sister's house in Rogers, Arkansas, and then yesterday afternoon Abigail and I drove to Neosho, Missouri, to attend a large gathering celebrating the life of a close cousin who is near the end of his life's journey.  That gathering was a very complicated mixture of joyous and sad, not an easy stream to navigate.

But it was good to be able to say good-bye face-to-face, as well as to be among so many old friends and relatives.

Someone told me that the "gun season" for deer began yesterday, and I came very close to getting a large doe with the front of my car.  As I was driving through the tiny town of Bakersfield, Missouri, doing the speed limit of 35-miles-per-hour, the doe came bounding across the road from my left and jumped in front of the car and then on to safety beyond the roadway.    She was, at the very most, no more than two feet from the hood of the car.  It was the closest that I have ever come to striking a deer.

Hitting a deer with a vehicle is a badge of honor among a certain class of locals - ones who drive banged, dented, and dilapidated vehicles which look as though they have withstood combat assaults.  I am convinced that some of the drivers of those wrecks actually speed up in order to hit the frightened deer.  While I am a cautious driver and have yet to hit my first deer, it is all to common to hear the good ol' boys yukking it up about the four, or five, or ten that they have hit over the past few years.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri twenty or so years ago, one of my fellow students, a lady probably about my age at the time -  early fifties or so - arrived at class late and apologized saying that she had hit a deer on the way to Columbia that evening.  She reported being shaken by the accident, but she had become even more rattled when two characters whom she described as looking like some of the hillbilly miscreants in the film "Deliverance," suddenly popped up next to her driver's window and asked, "Hey lady, do you want that deer?"  Then, when a highway patrolman arrived on the scene a few minutes after that, his first question to the shaken driver wasn't about the accident or her condition, but rather:  "Do you want that deer?"

Fortunately for Rosie and me, my reaction time was surprisingly swift, and my deer got away.  It was fortunate for the deer as well.

Rosie loved her visit with Aunt Gail, and she got to see her cousins, Reed and Justin, and their families, too.

And now we are back home in West Plains, and there are still a few patches of snow on the ground, and the forecast is calling for rain and snow tomorrow night.    When I was a little boy I remember that two years in a row we had the first snowfall of the year on Thanksgiving Day, but this has been the first time that I have ever seen measurable snow before Thanksgiving - and now with more to follow!  Earlier in the week the temperature here had been in the eighties, and Florida just had its first November hurricane in several years - and only the third since record-keeping  for hurricanes began in 1853.   I guess with all of this whacky weather, I can forgive Alexa for occasionally missing the mark in her weather predictions.

It's good to be home!