Sliders

Starting perhaps late Thursday night, freezing rain started falling in the Seattle area. By yesterday morning, most of the area was doing a passable interpretation of an ice rink. One neighborhood couple literally had their crampons on to go for a walk, and the slope of the street made standing in one place impossible for good stretches of it.

But the problem with the weather here in the Puget Sound area is almost never actually the weather itself; but in how people (mal)adapt to the conditions it brings about. My primary concern, which was that icy power lines would come down nearby and leave the neighborhood in the dark and cold, never materialized. So true to form, it was the people themselves that took it on themselves to cause problems.

I'd just happened to look out the front window when I saw a white SUV barrelling past. This doesn't end well, I thought, as the car exited my field of view. A moment later, my impromptu prophecy came true, as there was a loud bang from the street, followed by the startled clamor of a car alarm. Sure enough, the SUV had been unable to follow the gentle curvature of the street, and slammed into a car parked in front of the home next door.

What, I wondered, possessed someone to drive down the street at anything faster than a snail's pace? It wasn't as if the ice was difficult to see; it was an opaque sheet that in some places was half an inch thick. But that's one of the weird things about driving in this area when the weather is bad. Everyone knows that Seattlites fare poorly in bad road conditions. But really, it's the sizable minority who think that they're exempted from this who are the hazard.

I think it's because the local understanding is that people in the Seattle area are just bad at driving on anything other than bare (and maybe wet) pavement. But as a native of Chicago, I don't remember people there doing much better on expanses of ice; it's just that, back in Chicagoland, the local municipalities and highway departments have snow-removal equipment, protocols for keeping the street open enough to use it and, perhaps most importantly, stockpiles of salt and sand for slick conditions. That's what prevents the place from being one massive pile-up in the Winter, rather than some remarkable level of skill at driving.

The weather has warmed, and we're back to our usual diet of light rain. This is doing the work of de-icing the streets and making places passable again. And, unfortunately, perhaps allowing people to forget that when it comes to cars and driving, gravity always wins. It's just a matter of having the sense to not fight with it, when it's not on your side.