Sending out friendly reminders

Declan is eagerly awaiting the arrival of grandma at some point this month. I made the mistake of telling him several weeks ago that she was coming for a visit in late April, all he understood was April. Since the first of the month the very first words out of his mouth every afternoon are "Is grandma here?" followed by a sigh of disappointment from him and me repeatedly trying to explain that it would be several weeks before she arrived.

My mother began her trip in Idaho, with several scheduled stops to visit family throughout Montana and Wyoming, before eventually reaching her destination later this month in McCook. She has always been fond of long road-trips and we travelled as a family regularly growing up, at least once each summer.

I know the recent snowfall McCook received, and harsher weather north of here, will likely not discourage her. No matter where we lived growing up, my mother has never let weather interfere with her travel plans. Which is actually quite remarkable considering that meant braving the windy mountain pass roads of Montana, the extreme winds of Wyoming and the ferociously cold winters of North Dakota.

Her winter travels were usually solo trips, although I do recall one winter in North Dakota when she absent-mindedly ran us out of gas on the interstate in the middle of a 20 below blizzard.

My mother and I had to run a mere 20 feet to get into a semi-tractor that pulled over to help us, but during that short run I remember vividly the biting winds painfully freezing my tears to my face. I was only a grade-schooler at the time, but I took a personal interest in the level of our vehicle's fuel gauge from that day forward.

My seventh grade year my mother was on one of her solo trips, traveling in Montana on the pass between Missoula and Helena.

She was driving that very same hatchback Ford Mustang that I had backed through our neighbor's garage door previously. The rear-wheel drive of the Mustang made it a poor winter vehicle to begin with, but road conditions that particular day were bad for any vehicle.

She told me later that the snowfall was so thick that she could barely see past the hood of the car. She was struggling to follow the roadway ahead of her when suddenly she felt the vehicle lift up off the roadway and launch into the air. For a moment the snowstorm seemed to part and all she could see were the beautiful tops of pine trees level with the hood of the Mustang. Given the size of the pine trees in that area, she knew it was a long ways down.

My mom didn't panic, that wasn't her nature, she simply gazed at the top of all of the trees and said out loud with her typical chipper tone, "Oh....I'm dead." Which thankfully, was not the case.

The thick snowfall that had dangerously limited driver's visibility that day also served as several feet of padding between my mother's vehicle and the ground, which made the impact from launching off the road and flying down a nearby hill into the pine tree forest, surprisingly minimal.

My mother crawled out of the vehicle unharmed and made her way up the embankment she had driven off, returning to the roadway with ease, for the most part. A short walk later she reached an emergency phone, stationed at various intervals throughout the pass for just such occasions.

A tow truck was dispatched and my mother's Mustang was eventually pulled back up onto the road. The vehicle had only a few minor scratches from tree branches to show for the accident and it wasn't long before she was back on the road.

At the time I was amazed that both the vehicle and my mother had survived the incident without injury, but also that anyone could remain so calm throughout such an ordeal.

Declan and I will call and text her regularly over the next several days, checking in on her as she again makes her way over some of that very same roadway. She has no deadline for her arrival this time so I am not all that worried about her repeating mistakes and heading out into weather that she shouldn't be driving in. We will, however, be nudging her with friendly reminders to keep her gas tank full.