Experience is the best teacher

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.           ~Benjamin Franklin

Please note-- this isn't a photo of the actual car I talk about. I didn't have my cell phone handy enough for a photo of that one...

Most Wednesdays I travel down to see my mother, who lives in a retirement community about 25 miles from where I live. Since she has given up driving, I drive her around to run errands. We also "do" lunch together, and spend a lot of time chatting and just enjoying each other's company. Yesterday was one of those Wednesdays.

En route, I happened upon a car that had gone off the road. It was stuck in a snow bank, right next to a utility pole. There were 5 or 6 young men gathered, with the mission to help get the car out of the snow. One of them was "driving" the stuck car, and another was in an old minivan. The minivan had a chain attached to it's bumper and was attempting to pull the stuck car out of the snow from behind it. The driver of the car sat in it, spinning the tires as fast as they would go. Nobody was moving. I attempted to go around the car, but one of the 4 or 5 other young men stepped into the road and put his hand up. I had to stop. So I watched.

After just a minute or two of the chain pulling, there was a loud noise and I saw the bumper on the stuck car start to fold. The driver of the car spun the tires fiercely. The driver of the van kept up the pulling. There was more loud noise and I watched as the stuck car slowly move backwards, scraping itself against the utility pole. The passenger side mirror snapped off. The front bumper that curved around to the side crumpled. Slowly, the car became unstuck, but it sustained a great deal of damage to the rear bumper and the passenger side-- expensive damage. The young men who had gathered all cheered loudly, as if they had been successful, and I suppose they had been if the goal was to get the car unstuck. But at what cost?

I was reminded of this as my mother and I ate our lunch. We were talking about the weather, and about how the area we'd both grown up in was so different than what was usual here in Indiana. We are both Buffalo gals, born and raised in an area that regularly received a lot of cold and snow. We both had lots of memories of fun in the snow as children, and the perils of car travel in bad weather.

My mother remembered that as a young woman, she kept two carpet samples (they were about 2 1/2 feet square) and a snow shovel in the car. Our street was never plowed-- it was an old brick paved side street that didn't merit the attention of the city plow. But we always got in and out of our driveway because both my parents would go out and shovel the snow (and when I was older, I was out there helping too...), and once in the road they knew the secrets of driving in fresh, deep snow. Mom recounted that she often would get "stuck" but she knew that spinning tires only digs you deeper into the snow. She knew if you took the shovel and got rid of the snow behind the stuck tires, and then placed the carpet squares behind and under the tires, you could back up and then get moving again. Instead of spinning your tires, it was way better to rock back and forth, from Reverse to Drive, back and forth, back and forth until eventually you rocked right over the snow that had you stuck. And if you got really, really stuck, you assembled a team and one person steered and drove while the rest pushed. The worst thing to do was to sit and spin your tires. Especially when you were wedged up against a utility pole.

The winter we have had in Indiana is remarkably similar to those I remember as a kid in Buffalo-- snow about every 4 days, with bright, very cold days between. Our roads have had more snow and ice on them than I can remember in a good long while. Long enough that the young men assembled yesterday to help a friend get unstuck would have no experience driving on snowy roads. They would not have learned about carpet squares, snow shovels and rocking back and forth. I am sorry they didn't have anyone to tell them how to do it. Or, perhaps, that they were too young to be willing to listen.

I think the lesson here is that no matter what the problem, there is somebody out there who has dealt with it before and knows the best way to handle it. The secret is being wise enough to acknowledge we need help, and knowing who can give it to us. And listening. And learning. And once we've learned, sharing it with others.