Banned: Driving

Today my drive home was a sixty minute drive that took me from the city of Buffalo, whose roads were completely dry and clear, to this town in the middle of ski country that looks exactly the way it looked when I left it at 7:00 AM: snowy hell.

Today on my drive home a snowmobile roared past a line of slow-moving cars. I was in that line of slow-moving cars, somewhere in the middle, behind a Blazer that boasted a MY SON IS IN THE US NAVY bumper sticker. The snowmobile, which I had seen in my rear view mirror, pulled into the other lane and zipped past, raising a plume of snow and flurry behind it. The roads were perfect for snowmobiling: a compressed coating of snow, no visible pavement, no nothing. We drove forty miles an hour the entire way home.

When I went to bed last night, a lake effect snow band had been dumping snow onto western New York--specifically the south towns of Buffalo--for three days straight. It was getting bad out, and I didn't know if I should cancel class or not. Several of the towns I'd need to travel through the next morning had issued travel bans. The major highway I needed to use to get to both colleges where I teach was closed. But I went to bed on the assumption it would be open by the time I woke up.

It was. So I got ready, packed my bags, warmed up the car, packed myself a snack, and went on my way.

I have no idea why they opened that road. It was ridiculous. The plows had been on it, sure, but there was barely a clean swatch of road. The snow had come down so hard then frozen in sheets over the last few days that there were giant divots in the snow pack that covered the road, which had to terrorize every suspension that rumbled over it. I felt like I had gotten stuck on some clackity amusement park roller coaster--a wooden one, half broken, half ready to fall off the tracks.

But I kept on. I kept on because I had a class to teach at 8:00 AM, and I wasn't going to leave my students without a teacher. This class is at a community college, and my students are an eclectic mix: mothers with daycare issues, guys with full-time jobs. I didn't want to inconvenience them by making them come in when they could've stayed home, paid the babysitter one hour less, gotten some extra sleep, accomplished some extra work for the job.

I was almost late. I dashed from the parking lot across a couple one-way city streets and up the stairs to the front door. I tore around the corner and up the stairs. Four flights of stairs. And when I pushed into the classroom--which has an old US postal safe, complete with a bristling and patriotic-looking eagle painted across it, mainly because the building used to be the city's postal headquarters--there were only two students sitting in the classroom. It was 8:00. They stared at me. I stared at them. I thought about my warm bed back at the house, about how I could've stayed in that very bed for several more hours because it was evident we weren't going to get any great amount of learning done with only a couple students present. I was a little angry--after all, Buffalo was clear, clear, clear. Not a flake of snow in the air. Not an unplowed street to be seen. The only thing the city was dealing with was a -20 wind that was whipping off the lake.

Later, after I drove to my other college where I would teach three more classes, one of my students--a repeat, a boy I wrote a letter of recommendation for, a boy who refers to me as Miss Jess! Miss Jess! Miss Jess!--looked at me with big sad eyes.

"You couldn't cancel class today?" he asked.

"Please," I said.

"But weren't there travel bans?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "technically."

"And doesn't that mean no unnecessary travel?"

That's when I smiled at him and the rest of the class, told them to open their notebooks so we could start the day. "Oh, trust me," I said. "You're necessary."