A Marriage In Traction

My wife and I are having another one of those silly arguments.

As usual, the topic itself isn’t very important, but being proven right will result in eternal validation of my soul and my identity.

So, I’m going to write a column articulating my point of view. That way, I can show it to her and say, “See? Even this guy in the newspaper agrees with me.”

It all started when we were trying to decide whether or not to venture out during a snowstorm. My wife said she wished we still had our Honda CR-V.

Like most Americans, she feels safer driving a big, four-wheel-drive SUV in the snow.

I say our little two-wheel drive Civic is just as safe, if not safer.

(Of course, the safest vehicles have snow tires, electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, heat-seeking missiles, etc. But who has the time or money to keep changing tires or warheads every season of the year? So this debate eschews those options.)

I admit, my position is a bit unorthodox. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

To borrow an underused metaphor: anxiety about winter driving conditions is a virus. This virus has clogged the nasal passages of common sense. To alleviate the pressure, you have taken the Sudafed of misunderstanding. You feel better, but the medicine actually hinders your body’s natural defenses. Only the chicken soup of logic will finally restore your health.

So please, hear me out:

Sure, the four-wheel-drive gives you better traction when accelerating. But accelerating is rarely a safety concern, unless you’re trying to outrun something, like a snowplow whose driver has gone crazy from 84 hours without sleep.

Winter weather accidents result from sliding in an undesirable direction when stopping or steering, and the four-wheel-drive won’t help you in those departments.

In fact, a heavier vehicle requires more stopping distance. All else being equal, you can halt your momentum more quickly in a small car than you can in a large one.

If you’re worried about getting stuck, I suppose something with four-wheel-drive is a better choice. But getting stuck isn’t really a safety concern, unless you’re too far away from civilization to get help.

My wife may long for the traction our old car had, but not sliding at all on slippery roads creates a false sense of confidence. If the road doesn’t feel slippery, you become less cautious and attentive to your speed.

This is why, during a typical snowstorm, most of the vehicles you see off the road (at least those not driven by the young and the reckless) are four-wheel-drive pickups whose owners thought they were so high and mighty that they were immune to all the basic laws of physics.

I say it’s better to have a sense of what your real stopping and steering capabilities are, based on the overall handling of the car.

Anyway, I haven’t managed to make a lot of traction with my wife on this issue, so it would be great if everyone reading this could email me about how right I am.

Some of you loyal readers (Mom?) might remember the last time I disagreed with my wife on a vehicular issue; I ended up a humiliated victim on NPR’s “Car Talk.”

I could use a little redemption, ideally before she makes the appointment to get those missiles installed.

Snow Jobs

This week I'd like to devote some space to vehement, angry rhetoric against the most vile, disgusting, reprehensible creatures in the known universe.

No, I'm not talking about the people who made the “Holiday Greetings from Budweiser” commercial from 1983 that gets replayed every year – you know, the one with Clydesdales pulling a sleigh full of cheerful people through lots of blowing snow in some place that's probably supposed to look like Vermont.

I've spent limited time in the Green Mountain State, but I'm pretty sure their blizzards don't come with blue sky in the background any more than ours do.

But I digress. The evil humanoids I actually want to discuss are the folks in the service department at the dealership where my wife and I bought our car.

(I don't want to name this dealership, because I'm not sure if it advertises in this newspaper. So for now I can neither confirm nor deny that the dealership I'm talking about is Darling's Honda-Nissan off the Hogan Road in Bangor.)

I've weathered many attempted rip-offs by this anonymous establishment, which I'll refer to as “DHN” for no particular reason. So I was not surprised to have the following conversation with the nice lady at the service counter after one of their “technicians” had looked over our car:

Lady: “Well, you definitely need new brakes. And you should also replace the timing belt, since that was due at 105,000 miles.”

Me: “When we bought the car from you, we were told the timing belt had already been replaced. That was at 100,000 miles.”

Lady: “Well, we have no record of doing that here. We strongly recommend that you replace it, or else it will snap and cause your engine to explode.”

Me: “Uh-huh...”

Lady: “And your check-engine light is on because you need a valve adjustment. If you don't do this, giant spikes will shoot out of the seats and stab your family to death.”

Me: “I see. How much does that come to?”

Lady: “$7,834,784,309,323.33.”

I declined, but still had to pay them $130 just for checking the brakes and hooking the car up to their diagnostic computer, which apparently takes five hours.

This included a surprise “shop supplies” charge, which the lady explained was for partially-used containers of fluid.

Me: “None of the work on my car required any fluids.”

Lady: “They charge it to everybody, no matter what. They even charge it to their employees.”

While I waited for the valet (of course they have a valet) to get my car, I moped over to the waiting room, where a stack of outdated magazines was watching soap operas.

Somehow they couldn't afford decent TV reception; “The Young and the Restless” had more snow than that Budweiser commercial.

I spent another $13.75 in quarters on handfuls of peanuts while reminiscing about the time DHN told me my exhaust pipe was definitely going to rust off any minute now, and they needed a $300 part to fix it. I declined, and drove the car another three years before anything happened.

Anyway, when the valet finally brought my car back, I drove it to my local service station, which did the same work for about half the price.

Let's hope I don't die.

Creepy Weather Alert

Here is another reason to be glad you live in Maine, especially if you have regained any of the feeling in your fingers and toes after going out to get the mail.

A 66-year-old man in Brazil had to beat a 16-foot anaconda snake with rocks a couple of weeks ago in order to save his eight-year-old grandson. Anacondas don't normally attack humans, according to an Associated Press report, but it does happen once in a while.

In case you're not sure, a 16-foot snake is considered “heavy-duty.” The anaconda kills its prey like a boa constrictor, gradually squeezing until you can’t breathe.

As you know, we don't have such creatures in Maine. The closest thing we have matching this description is Wal-Mart, which has proven immune to all wildlife management efforts and can adapt itself to any environment.

But the fierce anaconda could not survive our winter, at least not without one of those remote car starters. To live in Maine, you have to take the weather in stride.

That’s why it perplexed me last week to see Governor Baldacci declare a “State of Emergency” before it even started snowing.

Does that inspire a lot of confidence in your state leadership? That the Governor himself would roll out of bed and start screeching spasms of panic before he even looks out the window? Maybe he just can’t get that creepy “StormCenter” music out of his head.

Anyway, it turns out that “State of Emergency” is a legal term that allows the government and certain businesses to ignore some laws (like behind-the-wheel time limits for truck drivers, or 55 percent state funding for education) for a specific period of time (years on end, apparently).

So a “State of Emergency” may or may not reflect what a non-government person would consider an “emergency.” We need some extra terms to let the public know the governor’s approximate armpit humidity level.

Here's what I propose:

State of Paxil-Induced Relaxation: Default setting.

State of Mild Nervous Twitches: Some troublesome weather which might cause inconvenience for tourists and other people who have no idea how to drive.

State of Genuine Concern: A storm of some kind that might require certain people to work for 154 hours straight and later require therapy. Maybe a few power outages.

State of Severe Anxiety: We might need the National Guard for a while, but things should return to normal before the next election.

State of Underwear-Staining Alarm: Extreme loss of life and property. Good luck finding anything from your previous life among the piles of rubble But things will still return to normal by the next election, at least as far as the national media are concerned.

State of Massachusetts: Complete apocalyptic chaos.

My system sure beats the terms we have now. Does anyone know the difference between a “winter storm watch” and a “winter storm warning?” We also have the “winter weather advisory,” “wintry wonderland watch,” “advisory on watchful weather warning,” and “wicked-high-wind wariness of doom.”

I’m just waiting for there to be a “snake advisory.” I want to see how the governor reacts to that one.

Beware the Plow Guy

By Chuck McKay

It's a scary combination, a retired guy with a plow.

I once had a retired neighbor who plowed his entire two-acre yard, including the lawn, every time it snowed more than a dusting.

This sometimes resulted in large snowbanks spilling over onto my property, but that didn't bother me because it blocked my view of him snorting baking soda through a garden hose.

At least that's what I imagine he was doing, because there is no other way to explain his insane behavior.

He once offered to plow us out after a particularly heavy storm, and we graciously accepted his offer, being new to the neighborhood and somewhat fogged in the head from the early hour (9:00 is harsh when you live in a bachelor pad).

Ninety minutes later, he had pushed into the woods behind our house all the snow he could find, baring areas where we would not have dreamed of parking, such as the ditch.

Then he knocked on our door to ask for $20. “We don't have the money,” I said. “We thought you were just doing us a favor.” He didn't budge. Eventually I gave him our box of baking soda from the fridge and he scampered away.

When I was a kid, a plow guy tried to get my parents to pay his towing bill after he got stuck. We pointed out to him that he had driven off our property and into a swamp, but the mad plow-guy distemper prevented any logic from penetrating his puny skull.

You can imagine how nervous I got when my father retired and bought a truck with a plow on it. Fortunately, Dad has plowed only reasonable, necessary amounts of snow so far. But it was hard keeping him from plowing his bare gravel driveway every few days to “smooth it out.”

Anyway, let all this be a lesson to you. When confronting all of life's little catastrophes, the simplest solution is usually the best, unless it involves bending over and lifting things with a shovel.

That's what I spent the rest of my winter doing after the falling-out with our obsessive-compulsive neighbor. It has resulted in life-long back problems, to the point where every time I do any degree of physical labor, such as carrying our bills back from the mailbox, I am required to lie down and receive a back-rub from a beautiful woman. It's my cross to bear.

That's why, after I moved to a new house, I started salivating when I saw our new neighbor, Phil, zipping back and forth along his driveway with a spiffy little walk-behind snowblower. Before I could find my shovel, he had his whole driveway looking spic & span, with all his excess snow neatly piled up on trees and other people's windows.

I couldn't afford a new snowblower, so I got a used one for $100 from my brother-in-law (whose sales motto is “good riddance”). When I finally had a chance to use it after a storm, I quickly discovered two complications:

1. Phil's driveway is newly-paved, whereas mine contains various pieces of rock, dirt, garbage, etc.
2. Not all snowblowers are created equal.

This second point dismayed me the most. My snowblower tried its best, dutifully picking up chunks of whatever-it-ran-into and depositing them right in front of itself. Even after I figured out how to maneuver the chute-thingy, I still had, at best, a rather inefficient means of moving snow.

So I scrapped the snowblower and invested in a collection of snow-scoops. This has been the best solution so far. All I have to do is ram the scoop into a section of snow, then slide it along until I find a suitable place to dump it off (Phil's driveway). Moderate exercise, no back problems, no little engines to maintain, no bizarre plow-guy behavior.

I highly recommend the snow-scoop method. But if you must hire a plow guy, you could always give my dad a call. We all know he's not too busy.

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