Share your snow accident stories

In My Humble Opinion
21

About ten years ago, I was driving home one night when I reached an intersection on one of the busier streets in town. Fortunately, it wasn’t very busy at the time, only light traffic. The light turned red, and I stomped on the brakes out of reflex. Normally, I’m a pretty decent winter driver, as natural selection tends to weed out bad winter drivers in Michigan pretty quickly, but there are some times when your feet do not consult your brain before acting. This was one of them.

My car immediately pinwheeled left across the intersection, spun broadside up the wrong way of a one-way street, continued its spin into the parking lot of a small business to the left–narrowly evading in the process a small number of oncoming cars filled with some rather horrified-looking people–slid across said parking lot, out of the parking lot and back onto the road…coming to a rest about a foot and a half from where I had intended to stop. I, uh, needed to lie down for a bit when I got home…

22

I was driving to school in my '85 Chevy Sprint (pretty much a geo metro with a chevy logo). I was coming up to a 90 degree left hand turn on a county road. There is a town road that continues straight as the county road turns left and this is the road that I always take to school. On normal day, you just keep going straight and you go from the county road to the town road.

We had had about a foot of snow the night before. The county roads were plowed, but the town roads were not. So, as I approached the intersection, I was faced with a wall of snow that was plowed off the county road with a unplowed town road behind it. The right front wheel hit the wall of snow before my left. This caused my car to get a little sideways as I got to the unplowed road.

I overcorrected and went into the ditch sideways - driver’s side first. When I hit the ditch there was so much snow that everything went white. I couldn’t see a thing outside my car as I was sliding. The effect of slowing down was pushing me into the driver’s side door. It seemed like I was slowing down forever as all my weight was forcing me against the door. After awhile I figured out what was happening. As I looked out my windshield, I could see snow gently falling horizontally from the right to the left in front of me. That’s when I realized that the car was on its side and had been stopped for quite some time.

There was so much snow on the ground that the only damage to the car was a dent in the fender from where I took out a road sign.

23

Yes! I did the same thing on an icy path, complete with the airborne for a moment thing. No injury though, except getting the air knocked out of me.

24

Ah, the back roads! I grew up here in Michigan, so was used to driving in snowy weather (well, as used to it as you can get when you’re 20). WE took a back road from a friend’s house to the local ski hill, and, as you can imagine, there had been a good deal of snow. This back road was dirt – rather, snow covered dirt – and we were tooling along when we came to a 90 degree turn. Needless to say, we didn’t quite make it through that turn, but instead went up a small hill and down a STEEP ditch into someone’s yard. As we went down the steep ditch (probably a drop of 10 or 15 feet, but seemed like more ), I went right between 2 trees with what seemed like inches to spare.

With no easy way to get back to the road, I decided to try to keep as much moentum as possible and make it to his looooong driveway (this was in a country-ish area, the guy had a LOT of land, probably 1/4 mile to his house from the road). No dice, so the friends had to get out and push. We were only about 50 feet from the driveway when someone came out of the house and offered to pull us the rest of the way with his tractor.

The best part, though, is that the next spring, I drove by the house, and when the yard wasn’t snow covered, I recognized it a little better. It was the one with the HUGE POND in the front yard. The one I had been driving over with my car.

25

I was driving up Provo (Utah) Canyon to go skiing in the winter of 1986. I was tooling along in my Mustang and had just started through a blind, icy curve when a fully-loaded semi-truck carrying lumber skidded through the corner sideways. I remember thinking “Oh, I’m dead!” but the truck missed squishing me by mere inches. The truck went over the edge of the road and rolled twice before landing upside down in the river. The trucker and his wife were just slightly injured and I shook for two days.

26

I would be dead today if not for the Reader’s Digest. (How many people can say that? I thought it was worth signing up just for this story.)

Mrs. Baileyoffsky and I were having a long discussion about driving on ice and getting out of a skid. I said use first gear to slow down and she said, no, use neutral. A few days later I happened upon a Reader’s Digest article about driving in snow, and it said to use neutral to regain control and first [or second or third depending on your speed] to slow down.) I showed it to Mrs. B and we both said “Told ya so.” (I was 23; not too mature.)

A couple days later I stepped off my front porch on my way to our sad maroon 1985 Reliant (it was 1993) a fell flat on my ass. “Oh, ice,” I thought.

Got in the car, backed out of the driveway and made it up the hill no problem. “Hmm. Ice must have just been on the sidewalk.”

Turn left to go down the steep hill to my sad job at a tiny central Pennsylvania newspaper, hit the brakes and immediately I’m thrown into a skid the likes of which I never felt before. I see houses, trees, parked cars, and my life flash before my eyes all at once. Somehow, I recall the Reader’s Digest. I throw it in neutral. Suddenly, I can steer. Hmmph.

Jam it into first. Slowing down … slowing down … ah… uh, oh … skidding. Neutral again. Recover. Then back to first and manage to creep 10 miles an hour the next 100 yards down this hill, to the end of the road and a stop sign.

OK. Time to think. I can’t make my normal left turn; it’s too sharp. Right is more gentle. I’ll just have to turn right. So I just skid into the intersection at 10 miles an hour, honking the horn the whole way. Surprisingly, no cars are coming. I make the turn, park in a nearby driveway and heave a big sigh. Think of going home to change my drawers, but I’m not trying that hill again.

Still, I canceled the Reader’s Digest subscription.

A year later, we’re in a new snowy town in another part of Pennsylvania. We live a mile down a dirt lane. 31 degrees, raining.

I turn onto my dirt lane and get 40 feet in when I can. not. move. Ice. Won’t let me go backward, forward, sideways, nothing. No sweat. I’ll just get the cat litter and ice melt out of the back.

I get out of the car and instantly fall flat on my ass and slide ACROSS the road. I can barely get up. This would be funnier if it weren’t 1 in the morning and I wasn’t on the way home from work, but still, I can see the humor. I must look like I’m drunk.

I end up crawling on my hands and knees to the car. I grab the fender (there really isn’t too much on a modern car to grab hold of) and pull myself up. I hang on for dear life to the roof rack and now have to figure out how I’m going to open the liftgate while hanging on to the car. I get back down on my hands and knees and manage to get the hatch up and get the stuff out.

As soon as I sprinkle it around the car I have enough traction to walk, so I figure I have enough to get the car back on the main highway. I take our road from the other end (only half a mile off the main highway with a slight downward incline). The whole way I slide one way on the gas and the other way on the brake, so I just zigzag 10 miles an hour the whole way. When I get to my driveway, I need to lay down more salt to turn the vehicle – luckily I brought it into the front with me.

I can only get so far in the driveway and then have to abandon the car. The grass is walkable but I have to crawl up the stone front porch. Unfortunately, the front storm door is frozen shut and the handle breaks off in my hands. Now I have to slide around the back.

Fortunately, the rest of the night – crossing a grassy yard and a wooden deck – was not nearly so slippery.