A Long Commute Home

The roads from Green Bay to Oconto Falls this morning were passable for the patient. I'm glad I didn't have to drive much farther though. Hwy 141 was closed north of Crivitz for part of the morning. That's a hazard of being a Regional Center instructor during the winter months in Wisconsin. Most of the time winter driving is not a problem, but once or twice a winter, getting to work can be a challenge.

The worst drive was a few years ago when I taught the 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. shift at the Shawano Basic Education lab. A storm was predicted for later in the day, but the initial drive was clear. Maybe the storm would pass south or north of us, I thought. By 4 p.m. the lab and most of the other classrooms had cleared out leaving me and a few front office staff members still at the center. Green Bay central offices officially closed the college at 5 p.m. releasing us. I thought of staying put, but decided to try my luck in the storm.

The road conditions, the closing dark, and the blowing snow almost forced me into a hotel/restaurant at the Hwy 29 interchange even before I left the city. But I pushed on driving down the on ramp onto the east-west highway. Most of the time, I could see tracks left by cars along the way. The plows had been pulled off by that time. Sometimes I was able to follow the lights of a car or truck in the distance, but I wasn't sure if the vehicle was on the highway or an access road. Most of the time all I saw was the suggestion of a road and the diagonal streaks of blowing snow. My speed was down to 20-15 mph at times as I kept track of the road by following the waist-high reflectors posted along the right side of the road way.

After creeping along for more than an hour, a car came up behind and passed me on the roadway. I sped up sticking to its tail lights, twisting and turning. I thought Hwy. 29 was a relatively straight road, but I kept behind those twin tail lights. When the car pulled off into a private driveway, I realized that I had followed it off the highway, onto an access ramp and north onto a crossing country road. I wasn't sure where I was headed, but I had three-quarters of a tank of gas and the road was a little clearer than before. I just kept driving.

I ended up in the city of Pulaski, a few miles north of Hwy. 29. Again, I was tempted to pull into an inviting restaurant to wait out the storm, but I didn't know how long the wait would be, so I turned south and rejoined 29. By this time the worst of the story had passed and the driving was just difficult, not impossible. I pulled into Green Bay's city limits, pulled off the side of the road and called Nan to tell her that I was safe and still on my way. The time was 7:30. A 45-minute commute from Shawano had taken more than two hours. I probably should not have been out, but now I was home.