Tag Archives: snow

The Cold

I went outside this morning and it was a bit chilly for Palm Springs standards. Still dark outside before six. I get up at 4:30 a.m. That’s when my alarm goes off. But I don’t get out of bed until sometime after five. Four thirty is too early. And I was wearing my T-shirt, shorts, and sandals with my backpack.

I look forward to the cold after about five months of insufferable heat that went as high as one-hundred-and-twenty degrees in this valley. It’s time for the weather to start cooling down. I used to live in Pittsburgh in my elementary school years where it reached freezing temperatures. We expected snow. Our pipes froze in the winter one year. I can’t remember what it did to our house. That was as extreme as it got for me, those five years in Pittsburgh before my father moved us to Florida, where it was warm all year. And then he moved us to California three years later. The weather was warm for most months, but it would get sort of cold in the winter.

One year it actually snowed in the town we lived in back in 1999. It was newsworthy because it hadn’t snowed there since 1976 before I was born. Funny to believe the snow fell for only a day in 1999 before it cleared up again. Needless to say, I’m not used to snow. I’ve forgotten what it’s like after almost thirty years. It has been that long. Yikes. I’m a warm-weathered person, but aren’t most of us? Who appreciates the cold? On the flip side, who appreciates the heat? Don’t we all wish we were living in Santa Barbara where it’s seventy-something degrees all year round? Except for the mornings when it drops to about fifty degrees, which is still tolerable. I can sleep well at that temperature, unlike in the summer months in Palm Springs when the heat is about ninety-eight degrees in the middle of the night.

I don’t get sick often anymore. I would when I was a child when the weather changed. I would get the flu every winter in Pittsburgh, and it would last about a week with a fever and congestion. The flu would return, or just a cold, when the weather was warm again around March or April. I don’t get sick much anymore for some reason, maybe once every two years, if that. I still get migraines if it’s too hot, but I wouldn’t blame the weather this morning. I don’t know what to blame it on other than the possibility that I may have slept wrong. But at least I slept. That’s all I can ask for.

The Snow in California

When it rains in Southern California, the citizens don’t know how to react. But when it snows, everyone freezes along with the temperature. It hasn’t snowed in Los Angeles since the early sixties. And it rarely snows in Central California, where most of my family lives.

Back in 2018, it snowed in Bakersfield on the day or so after Christmas. I had to drive back to Hollywood that day. The 99 was closed, going up the grapevine, and that was my usual route. So I had to take a detour up through Tehachapi, where the snow had to be about five inches deep.

I stopped to get gas and almost slid to the ground when I reached for the pump.

It was a three-hour stall just getting there. I’d never seen anything like it in my life except for when I used to live in Pittsburgh for five years, where I expected snow every winter. But that was when I was a child. I was forty-one when I was stuck up in Tehachapi. It would take seven hours to get back to my apartment.

When the traffic finally cleared up, I split onto the 14 freeway toward Lancaster. The road was icy, and diesels surrounded me.

I drove at about fifty miles per hour and tried to glide easily across the ice. Then, at some point, I slid across a sheet, and instinctively, I slammed the brakes. My car spun around like a dreidel. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. My Hyundai stopped spinning after about three revolutions, and I continued forward without a bruise or a scratch. But my heart was still thundering. I didn’t want to die that way.

I finally made it home at about eight at night after a seven-hour journey through the mountains. I turned on the heater in my studio apartment and watched a movie on Netflix. It wasn’t snowing in Los Angeles. Hell, it wasn’t even raining. It was just cold and dry like it usually is in December. But I’ll never forget the time on the 14 when I almost slid to my death.