Driving home for Christmas

There is a commonly held belief that people in countries other than England deal with snowfall and icy conditions better than we do. It doesn't seem that many years ago, although it probably is far more than it seems, that Stansted Airport had to be closed because of a snowfall of just over an inch. This could never, blurted out London's Evening Standard, happen in any other country.

I take a small measure of pride in my resilience. When we lived in the Lake District, my kitchen shelves were weighed down with enough food to feed a family of eight for two months. When we lived in the  North East of England we had winter tyres on the car, flashlights and blankets in the car boot. I've sought advice on driving in snowy and icy conditions: keep the car in a high gear with low revs, only lightly dab the brakes, work with the energy of the car, steer into skids etc.

And so, I thought that I knew a little. Perhaps even quite a lot, but only for an English woman. Nothing compared to that which a person in another country would know, right? I mean, in New England they have real snow and they know how to deal with it. You won't see airports closed and people keeping off the roads just because of a few snow flakes.

Last year there wasn't much snowfall in Cambridge - it's been nicknamed 'the winter that never was' - but even when there was enough snow on the ground for us to go sledging, there wasn't a flake upon the roads. At the first signs of snowfall, people would be out in their trucks with the snow shovels on the front. I was impressed.

Two days ago, Vermont received one of the first snow falls of this season. It was very, very pretty: just a few inches but beautiful to look at. I was staying in a writers' retreat just outside of Rochester. The snow was the icing (pardon the pun) on the cake - the entire stay was perfect. I even had the opportunity to go for a couple of walks in the snow (in the snowboots which I had remembered to pack - I was well-prepared, see!)

But, although I felt well-prepared for a little snow fall, the Vermonters who worked at the Retreat were not convinced by my competence. I needed to drive home. They conferred in the kitchen: two women and a chef called Paul.
'Had I', they called out to the dining room, 'any experience of driving in the snow?'
'A little,' I replied, fairly unperturbed. 'High gears, low speeds, avoid hard braking.'
There was a pause.
'Is there a way of putting an automatic gear box into a higher gear?' I asked more tentatively.
'No.'
And my sense of preparedness gradually ebbed away. The hire car didn't have winter tires. It didn't have snow chains or ropes or flashlights or blankets. The safest route out of the Retreat and down to Rochester included a couple of very steep hills.

Paul, the chef, took off his chef's coat and took control. There were clearly two variables at stake here: the suitability of the vehicle and the suitability of the English woman who knew nothing about snow. He took the car for a drive around the block. It handled, in his opinion, acceptably well. The staff decided to give me a coaching session, telling me to go very slow, telling me who to call if I should end up in a ditch. I raised an eyebrow at the thought at ending up in a ditch or wrapped around a tree but they assured me that all Vermonters had this experience every now and again. Just take it steady, they said.

I took it very steady. Significantly steadier than the four cars behind me would have wished. It is possible that we could have all walked to Rochester in the time that I crept along the lanes.
But I was safe, the hire car was in one piece, and my wise Vermont counsellors had assured me that it would all be fine once I was on the interstate. And the interstate did seem fine. People were driving slightly slower than normal - around 60mph rather than 70 - but the tarmac was clear of snow and I passed a gritter. I smiled: I'd navigated the Vermont lanes and now it would all be plain sailing: these New Englanders know how to deal with snow, right?

The first three cars that I saw in ditches didn't worry me unnecessarily. The first had a young teenager girl sitting behind the wheel, facing the wrong way and obviously irritated that her car was in a ditch. The second had a tow truck slowly pulling him out. The third had been abandoned. I eased off the gas a little: I didn't want to end up in a ditch but I knew that I had a number in my phone that I could call if it happened. I wasn't worried: they must have been driving too fast; they must have been playing with their phones, not concentrating, changing the CD in the car stereo. The road looked fine.
The fourth car was upside down and the police had cordoned off one lane of the interstate. There was an ambulance with flashing blue lights. Within the next mile, I passed four more cars in ditches. They weren't there because of driver error as such, they were there because we were driving on sheet ice. The signs said that it was 12 miles until the next exit.

I love driving: the isolation of the road, music on the stereo, the shifting landscape and the sense of moving on. These past few months, I've daydreamed about being a long-distance lorry driver, leaving all my troubles behind and looking towards the horizon. Yesterday, I was almost sick with fright. Perhaps that's what's it like for people who are scared to drive: white knuckles tightly wrapped around the steering wheel ('grip the wheel lightly with both hands' a voice inside my head reminded me every time my hands clenched), driving more and more slowly ('keep moving in accordance with the flow of the traffic', the little voice reminded me - if I drove too slowly the car behind would need to brake and there'd be carnage), and desperately counting down the miles to the next exit.

I rolled into the gas station at the first exit. Unnerved, unsettled but in one piece. The gas attendant looked a bit cold, but otherwise fairly unconcerned about the weather.
'There's a lot of cars in ditches out there,' I said, careful to keep the tremor out of my voice.
'Which way you come from?' The attendant was perhaps eighteen, adolescent acne still decorating his chin, but his voice was that of a much older man.
'I'm heading East, from Vermont.'
'Ahh,' he looked unsurprised, almost uninterested. 'You always get a fair few in ditches on that stretch when it's cold. You keep going,' he indicated vaguely towards the East, 'And it will get better in ten miles of so.'
I waited until the gritter passed and then joined the slower cars who were crawling along behind. It took a long time to get home.
I'm no longer sure that New Englanders are inherently better at dealing with snow than Old Englanders, it's just that they're not as interested in making a fuss when things go wrong.