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You are never too old to be stupidby Ken Root There's been plenty of bad weather all across the country this year. We had our second blizzard yesterday, and it was one of those events that scares me more looking back than it did at the moment I was in it. When judgment is lacking at a critical moment, it leads to confrontation of reality and then to examination of character. In my case, it has happened behind the wheel of a car and alone in a small airplane. I'm still writing, so the outcome was satisfactory, but most of us at some time in our lives put ourselves into perilous situations that can only be survived by pushing on through to the other side. "If I say I'm going to be there, I'll be there!" How often is that the basis for making a bad call on heading out into inclement weather? I backed out of my nice, warm garage and bounced the four-wheel drive Chevy truck over a snowdrift, then slid on the ice as I turned toward the road. I zeroed the trip meter and started the timer, then called OnStar and told them the name of the place I needed to go. "One hundred ninety-nine and one-half miles. Approximate travel time, two hours and fifty minutes," said the lady, who was probably sitting in a cubicle a thousand miles away and had no idea that the highway was covered with snow and the wind was blowing 35 miles per hour. I started seeing cars strewn across the median, all abandoned with yellow tape tied to the doors by the trooper or wrecker who had rescued them. I convinced myself that the driver of each vehicle was incapable of driving in these conditions, while I had traction under me and the skill to get from point A to point B without incident. I didn't put a face on any of those who had failed to stay on the path or even those who were upside down; I just lumped them together as having inferior driving skills and mushed on. Then I began to come upon the wrecks. Usually it was a tall semi-trailer running empty that had been hit by a gust of wind while on an icy stretch. The driver had no hope of regaining control as he slid sideways down a road narrower than his rig. Some stopped without further incident and blocked traffic, while others had literally run over cars that were crumpled under them. Flashing lights from ambulances surrounded the worst. My first hour was the slowest, as I had to work around these wrecks and then pick my way along the roadway, where one lane was clear enough that a few stripes showed up and the other side was completely snow-packed. I was heading east and kept thinking that I would drive away from the city and see improving conditions, which I did. Forty-five miles in the first hour, then up to sixty for the second and now running on wet pavement with 26 degrees on the outside thermometer. I could tell I had reached my destination because the restaurant was ringed by farm trucks and a few vehicles displaying decals from the local bank that was putting on the event. I walked in with every intention of telling them how treacherous the drive had been, then realized that most of the farmers had come only a few miles on a two-lane road and really didn't care. I waited my turn, thanked the man who introduced me, showed my slides, had lunch and departed. I knew the way home, so my mind turned to what the weather was like now. How about just pulling in at a motel and spending the night? I had another appointment late in the day, so that was justification for driving back home no matter how bad the conditions were. I turned on the radio and found that Central and Western Iowa were experiencing full blizzard conditions and five inches of snow had fallen with winds up to 50 miles per hour. The announcer said, "Whiteout conditions are common, and travel is discouraged unless absolutely necessary." I was still driving on wet pavement and estimated I was about a hundred miles from dinner with a business associate, when the world turned white. Actually, it was more like driving into a bag of flour. It was the dreaded whiteout that is caused by high winds churning the light snow into a powdery mass and keeping it floating above the ground. It doesn't have to be snowing for this phenomenon to occur. You just need a layer of snow and wind blowing above 25 miles an hour. Several years ago, when flying a small plane across Kansas in marginal weather at night, I flew into a cloud bank that took all visibility away from me. The big airlines do this all the time, but they are on an instrument flight plan and are trained to fly without visual contact with the ground. I was not. I realized that there were two eventualities: I could get my head into the artificial horizon instrument of the airplane and make a controlled turn back out of the cloud, or I could die. I found an inner calm that told me that it was up to me, and only me, to save myself. Panic would kill me, and they'd just write me off as a pilot who made a bad judgment call and paid the price. I kept the plane coordinated in the turn and prayed there wasn't another idiot in that cloud with me. I came out flying level and reoriented to the lights on the ground, then turned back to my original heading and went under the clouds to my destination. In this case, at 50 miles an hour on an interstate highway, it wasn't quite as life-threatening, but cars and trucks had to be close by and I couldn't see anything. Finally, a dark shape and four taillights showed up in front of me, and I settled in behind a truck that was breaking through the wind and snow. I followed him closely but with the anticipation that he could hit something or run off the road ahead of me. As we neared the city and heavier traffic, I began to see twice as many cars embedded in the drifts on the roadside and median. A highway patrol car had been rear-ended by a pickup, and the jack-knifed trucks were making it an obstacle course. A wrecker driver suddenly became visible, flagging us down from the left lane so we could avoid a wreck ahead. The going was slow and the ice was treacherous, but my trucker friend kept rolling and we made it. I took the south bypass, now on my own, and got out into the wide open spaces where they were closing the highways just to get people off them for their own good. A couple more whiteouts--and I pulled into the restaurant to meet a friend. Four-hundred miles, half of it driven under duress, and all of it driven without justification of the risk. "I'm the expendable part of the gene pool," I tell myself, but I know I got away with it once again. I wonder if God really looks after us when we do things like this, or if he just treats us like the father of the prodigal son did, letting us go out on our own and then loves us, stupid and undeserving as we may be, when we return. Editor's Note: Ken Root is an independent agricultural journalist. He was named the 2009 Farm Broadcaster of the Year and was the 2008 winner of the Oscar in Agriculture. He is an Oklahoma native and graduated from Oklahoma State University with a degree in Agriculture Education. Ken taught vocational agriculture at Union City, Okla., before taking his first broadcasting job with WKY Radio and Television. He worked in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri as an agricultural broadcaster and began writing for the High Plains Journal eight years ago. He has spent the last five years as Lead Farm Broadcaster at WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Ken has also been the executive director of the National AgriChemical Retailers Association in Washington, D.C. and the National Association of Farm Broadcasting in Kansas City, Mo. He and his wife Gail have two adult children and two grandchildren.
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