I thought my argument sounded quite reasonable.
“Sis, I agree with Alex.” My baby sister Alexi agreed with Alex. “I want us to keep going. I have some work due this week preparing for my finals and I had planned to use tomorrow as a research day. Call Dad and tell him to cover for you on the farm. You can just stay with us in the spare room.”
“Mom, just drive slower. I don’t care if it takes us all night to get there. I just need to be there by tomorrow.” Alex pleaded.
I was a total sucker for my kids. My baby sister and my son were born on the same day, same hospital. My mother and I nursed both kids just because it was convenient to raise them together. These days most people just assume that Alex and Alexi are twins because of their appearance, age and similar names. They also assumed I was the “twins” mother or older sister.
“Well ok, even if I think this is a really bad idea!” I conceded. It was seldom that I ever made a decision against what Alex and Alexi wanted. Hey they were the certified geniuses and I figured if both agreed on something it was probably the right answer. Just to let you know they acted like typical twins and seldom agreed on anything. So my weigh in was usually the tie breaker.
“But if it gets any worse out here, I’m turning around. No arguments right?” Hey someone had to sound like the adult here.
But it did get worse… a lot worse. But by then we were already ¾ the distance to Minneapolis. So I made another Mom decision that it would now be far safer for us to just keep going. Hopefully staying in front of the worst of it. I would just weather out the storm in the city with the kids, then return home back towards Smith County North Dakota.
Alex was now playing a very active role on keeping me on the road, I figured two sets of eyes were better than just mine. But as the day waned on, even at twenty miles per hour, following the road was not an easy thing. First off the road was covered in frozen snow making it a white landing strip.
On either side of the road was hundreds of thousands of plowed acres of farmer fields. All frozen and now also covered in white. But in the “Great White North”, snow doesn’t stand still when it hits the ground. No instead the wind makes the snow take off sideways. Clumping together in moving rows, like a huge white snake crawling across the fields and roads. The ditches provided limited wind breaks and were already filled, but now in this blizzard, the ditches were now full of snow making no gap between interstate and the fields a few yards away.
Through my head lights and frosted windows, all I could see was white on white on white. With no distinct features to tell me what was the road or ditch or field. Only the occasional tree growing on a buried fence row gave me any significant landmarks at all.
I kept my headlight beams on low since my light beam was blinding me. Light refracted strangely and most of my light actually was being reflected back into our eyes verses the road in front of me. Night time comes early and with the blinding snow, it got darker quicker than usual. It was like driving in a comic book universe where the world was unfinished, with no details having been painted yet by the artist except for the hood of my car. Little did I know what the artist had planned for us on this blank sheet of paper out of our window.