Life In The North

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It seems like all the snow we normally would have gotten in December and January decided to save itself up and wait until February to come around. It's been a rough couple of weeks where I live, but thankfully we aren't dealing with the flooding and other fun stuff that they are seeing down south.

In fact, @mrsbozz and I were pulling out of the Columbus, OH area just as the fun was getting started. We hit just about every form of precipitation on the four hour drive home that actually ended up being closer to five hours due to slow traffic because of the road conditions.

It started with ice, and then it moved on to rain, then sleet, and finally snow by the time we got within about half an hour of home. We saw no less than five accidents and we were almost involved in one of them.

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This is the first one we came across. We ended up losing about a half hour sitting on the road waiting for them to pull this car out of the brush. What you can't see is just the other side of those trees is the Sicoto River in Columbus, OH. This road curves along the side of the river and these folks were about twenty feet away from plunging right into it. The police had both lanes blocked while the wrecker did its thing, so all we could do was wait.

Just a bit outside of Delaware, OH, we were cruising along thinking the roads might not be so bad when suddenly things seemed to get a bit slushy. If you have ever driven in slush, you know it can pull your car pretty much anywhere it wants. It's almost more dangerous than snow. I was keeping a good distance between myself and the car in front of me when suddenly a car in the right lane decided they wanted to get over. They threw on their blinker almost as an afterthought and slid in between me and the car in front of me.

Then they slammed on their brakes!

I tapped mine to slow down and maintain distance which I may not have done had the roads been dry. Thankfully I did because suddenly the car in front of us sped up and then went flying across the median before coming to rest about an inch shy of the opposing lanes. The only thing I can think happened is they caught the slush on the side of the road, over compensated, and then totally lost it.

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Things went pretty smoothly after that with a few exceptions. Marion, OH to Toledo, OH passed with little fanfare. Then when we crossed the Ohio/Michigan border we came up behind a semi truck that had just jack-knifed across both northbound lanes of traffic. It had just happened because emergency crews weren't on the scene yet. As we got closer we had to drive on the shoulder to get around the big rig. I noticed a black car deep down in the ditch to the right side of the road. I'm guessing something must have happened between the two vehicles. Luckily we weren't involved in it either. Perhaps waiting that extra half hour for that accident to clear down in Columbus saved us.

Needless to say, the winter can be a treacherous and interesting time. We don't get it nearly as bad as the folks in Minnesota or Canada, but living in Michigan I still consider myself as coming from the "north" and as such, That is going to be my theme for this weeks #threetunetuesday sponsored by @ablaze.

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While "Life In A Northern Town" by Dream Academy may not specifically give you the feel of just how cold it can get up here (except maybe that line in the second verse). It is a nice look at the small towns that I have worked in, played in, and passed through on both my travels and as part of my daily routine.

This song is pretty amazing when you really break it down and it kind of makes me sad that Dream Academy didn't get much bigger in the US. They pretty much just had this one song that didn't even break into the top five on the US charts.

Although they never saw a ton of commercial success, they managed to stay together until 1991 when they finally disbanded according to Wikipedia.

If you ever get a chance, maybe check out the cover of "Life In A Northern Town" by Sugarland. It's very good.

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This is another one of those songs where it really only has one small reference to my theme of the week. However, it also has a kind of somber and sad feel that you can really feel if you look at the photos I shared here. While the snow and cold can be magical and beautiful, there are also times that it can take you down some deep dark holes in your mind. It's hard to explain, but there is often a profound silence on a cold snowy night. The blanket of icy particulates absorbs pretty much all sound and there is just a stillness that you really have to feel to understand.

"Girl From the North Country" by Bob Dylan gives me that same kind of feeling. As I said before, there is something somber and reflective about it. Not literally reflective, but figuratively reflective. This song is so iconic that I highly recommend you check out some of the covers of it. There are tons, and pretty much all of them are good. Just ignore the fact that Dylan took elements of Scarborough Fair for some of the lyrics. Did you even catch that?

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Finally, this song really needs no introduction and the only reason I am actually including it today is because I ran out of time to think of another song to post here. It fits the theme though and Foreigner is just awesome. I'm actually a big fan of Lou Gramm from Foreigner. I think his solo song "Midnight Blue" is one of the best songs of the 80's. This post is about winter though, so "Cold As Ice" was the perfect song to close out this post with. We woke up to temps in the 0 degree range today. Fahrenheit. In fact, it was -1 when I pulled into work. They are calling for windchill temps close to -20 which is right on the verge of them calling off school.

We've already had two cold days this year when temps were in the -20 to -30 range. That's -29 to -34 for the rest of the world!

Stay warm!

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced