Highway 85

A Story About Fate, Tempted

Yesterday we drove from Connecticut to North Carolina. We have family here, and it’s a trip we’ve made often. Every drive seems to offer up unique challenges, like horrendous traffic going through New York City or a car fire inside the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, or smaller personal challenges, like waiting too long to take a pee break on a road with no exits. Yesterday, though, there were no such obstacles, and we were on course to make record time.

Then, we got to Virginia. I noticed that the outside temperature was 27 and it was raining. I saw the thickening glaze of ice coating everything, from tree branches to our windshield wipers. There was a flashing sign on a highway overpass that Route 85, which we were about to take, was hazardous, and to find an alternate route. Neither Google, Waze, or Apple Maps gave options, so we stayed the course. Figuring that 85 was slippery, we reasoned we could just slow down.

Route 85 actually seemed okay. It was wet, not icy. Then, traffic came to a sudden stop for ten minutes. We saw the flashing lights of police cars before the road re-opened. We drove past, looking for the aftermath of what we assumed was an accident, but there was just sawdust and debris lining the road from a tree that must have fallen across it. I’m glad we weren’t under that, I said to Sam.

I kept driving into a slow, terrifying realization.

The hazard wasn’t the ice on the road, but entire trees and overhanging limbs, weighed down by ice, crashing onto the highway at random intervals. We drove fifteen miles of Route 85 swerving around fallen trees, massive limbs, and the occasional downed power line. Caution and vigilance would only get us so far. It came down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and on a highway bordered by towering pine trees, we were surrounded by countless chances for just that.

We finally got to North Carolina, where the temperature was just above freezing and rain fell, rather than trees.

I will never forget that drive through nature’s booby trap. If I had known what lay ahead, I would not have done it, but like other precarious situations you find yourself stuck in, you have no choice but to keep going. On the far side of the survival you’re white-knuckling toward, you have a story to tell.