Black Ice and Grace

I sat at the Reference Desk watching the clock tick down to the magic 5 o'clock hour. Friday night, and I was headed to the all Seminary retreat at the Salvation Army camp in Penn Yan, about an hour away. It was my good fortune to carpool with a classmate - I hate driving, especially at night, especially in snow, and at five it was lightly coming down in big flakes, turning the parking lot into a Currier and Ives scene.

We chatted as we drove east on the Thruway to exit 42, swapping life stories and laughing at our escapades. Once we got off the Thruway, we were supposed to head South towards Lyons. Unfortunately, the sign for Lyons pointed to the left, but 14 south pointed to the right. Confused and in the wrong lane, we took the left turn and drove several miles before we decided we were going the wrong way. At that point, we stopped for dinner since the camp would not offer a meal until Saturday.

The lines were long, and my friend was concerned at how late it was getting. We were definitely not going to make the 7pm registration deadline. There was no help for it. We got our food, scarfed it down, and headed back in the direction we had come. The snow had stopped for the most part, and the roads were pretty much bare. Since we had never been to Penn Yan before, we had to keep slowing down at intersections to read the names of the street, looking for the left turn indicated on the directions.

We had been at it for about twenty minutes when we saw the blinking yellow light ahead. Thinking this might be the turn, my friend touched the brakes. Suddenly we found ourselves sliding out of control. It happened so fast we barely had time to react. Even though the road was covered in salt, it did little good in preventing us from sliding on the black ice beneath. She steered in the direction of the end of the vehicle, fishtailing all over the road. For a brief moment, I thought we were going to end up in the ditch backwards. It was almost as if time were passing in slow motion. I remember thinking that if we hit dry pavement at this speed, we would flip the car altogether. Just as quickly as we began sliding, the car came to a standstill crosswise in the middle of the road.

There were no cars coming, thank God. We would have wiped out for sure. There was one car approaching the intersection, but as soon as he saw us sliding, he stopped and waited to see what would happen. I looked at her, and she looked at me. We were unhurt. The car was not damaged in any way. "Are you OK?" I asked.

"I'm not breathing yet," she answered. But we couldn't stay in the middle of the road, so she slowly righted the vehicle and crept through the intersection, shaken. She held it together though. We found our turn, dismayed to find that we were headed down a winding unlit country lane - I joked that it looked like we were descending into hell. She didn't find it humorous, but then, she was driving.

Later we found out that a half hour before we reached that intersection there had been two bad accidents there - before the salt trucks had covered the black ice. One was so bad the emergency crews had to use the jaws of life to extricate a driver. The other van had overturned and rolled into the ditch. It was just the grace of God we got confused about the direction to go or we might have been one of those accidents they were talking about.