I'd heard the legends of the snow in Denver before I moved up there. Blizzard conditions, people being stuck in their homes for weeks, nobody going to work. I'd seen bad snow in New Mexico, but it was very infrequent. Denver was going to be a whole new level of winter.
We didn't get snow in the fall of 1988 until November. I'd heard on the local radio stations that this was the longest it had gone without snowing. One morning in November, the skies were overcast, but the temperature was rather mild. But when I listened on the radio, they were predicting snow. I thought, "Really? It doesn't feel like it's going to snow." However, the person on the radio said something like, "If you're new to Denver, I know what you're thinking! But those of us who have been here awhile know it's going to happen today."
Sure enough, it snowed. But it wasn't too bad. The streets were still somewhat warm, so most of it melted away. We had a few more incidents of snow the next couple of weeks. Nothing really major.
Then in December, we got the REALLY BIG snowstorm people had been bracing for. I happened to be Downtown at the City and County Building working as an extra on a TV-movie when it started coming down. Our waiting area was in the main lobby and all of us extras just stood by the front doors and watched the snow come down.
After shooting had completed, I walked to the parking lot where my car was located and started driving home. It usually took about ten minutes to drive home from Downtown. However, I ran into something I've never experienced before: gridlock. This is where cars are completely stopped in the intersection when you have the green light and you cannot move forward. When I did move, my wheels often spun because they couldn't get any traction. Listening to Y108, it sounded like someone was doing a complete play-by-play of my drive home. And every once in awhile, the station would play a recording of wheels spinning out in the snow. EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY DID THAT, I thought it was MY car making that noise. I actually thought it was a pretty funny practical joke.
At one point, I was going up a hill to get onto Broadway. My car kept sliding backwards. I was tempted to just park it, walk home and come back for it the next morning. But I was able to get up the hill and be on my way. Along the way, my car wouldn't move forward. I had to get out of my car a couple of times and motion for the person behind me to give me a push. My car also slipped a couple of times and hit some parked cars. I didn't stick around or leave a note. I figured this was the one day the cops couldn't really do anything.
It would usually take me 10 minutes to get home from Downtown. With this snow, it took me TWO HOURS. I was supposed to work that night and my supervisors got kind of mad at me for not showing up without calling. I had no way of knowing it would take me that long to get home and I was so traumatized that I certainly didn't feel like getting on the phone and doing surveys the rest of the night. I went home and went straight to bed.
I still had one more day to work as an extra. I decided not to drive and walked instead. The whole week, the production company would reimburse us each a dollar for parking in the lot. Even though I didn't use the lot that day, I told them I did and took the dollar. I really needed that dollar.
After that, I swore I would never drive in heavy snow ever again. And I never did. I learned how to take the local bus system and made use of it quite frequently during the next few years. I was always able to get where I needed to go when I needed to get there.
The first snowfall in the fall of 1989 came relatively early. One night in September, I walked out to my car after work and found six inches of snow on my car. However, there was no snow on the ground. This was a bewildering sight.
I found out that the three winters I lived through in Denver were relatively mild. There were no blizzards or major snow drifts during that time, but it seemed like the snow wasn't finished with me when I was moving to San Diego. I left Denver on 10/29/91. I had loaded up the U-Haul and was towing a car back to Artesia. It started to snow as I drove out of town. I kept the radio tuned to KOA and found out that it was a monster snowfall, causing all sorts of problems. On top of this, the storm was heading south. It was actually chasing after me and it followed me all the way to New Mexico. I was able to keep ahead of it, which was good, because there was no way I was going to be able to drive a U-Haul while towing a car in the snow, especially going through Raton pass. We rarely got snowfall in November in New Mexico and it was snowing in October for the first time that I could remember.
I wouldn't mind if I never saw snow again.
No comments:
Post a Comment