My Blizzard of ’78 Drive Home from Work

The predictions were 6-12 inches when I went into work that evening as night shift computer operator at Malden Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the last of the great textile mills of New England.  My normal shift was 6pm-2am, but it was open-ended as I was required to stay until the work was done, there being no shift to relieve me until the daytime people came in at 8am.

I didn’t think much of this prediction as three weeks previously we’d had a 20-inch storm.  The headlines in the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune read, “Storm of the Century!”  Nobody remembers that storm now.  And I’d been living in the snow belt for over four years at that point, including Worcester, MA, Atkinson, NH and now Lawrence, MA.

My apartment was on the third floor of a 3-decker, right on Broadway in Lawrence, across from both a Jack-in-the-Box and Broadway Liquors.  It wasn’t much, just three rooms.  Maybe its most interesting feature was access to the roof through a hatch above a small hallway.  When I’d climb up there, I’d be eye-to-eye with “Jack,” the rather large structural replica of the Jack-in-the-Box logo.  A phone booth stood on the corner, below my living room window, that would occasionally ring, always answered by a tenant on a lower floor who apparently used it as his home phone.  A Hispanic bar was also nearby.  I once stopped in for a drink, but got the distinct impression I was not wanted.  After-work hours were often spent drinking and watching Five All Night on my black and white television.  I’m pretty sure I saw every Charlie Chan movie ever made.

The computer room was in the interior of a 19^th century mill building.  There were no windows and no radio reception other than one local station that, during night hours, had no live DJ, just an automated feed of recent pop/rock music.

The shift ran long that night, as was occasionally the case, and I’d heard from a few people who had come in from outside, that conditions were worse than predicted.  But I was totally focused on solving the problems of the night until that glorious hour when the last of the lengthy printouts were emitting from the giant printer and I could wheel the cart of input tapes to the offsite storage area in an adjacent building.  That building was accessible via a tunnel connecting the two buildings, again with no windows all the way there and back.  By 4am I was done for the night and ready to brave what the storm may have left behind.

I exited the exterior door … my jaw dropped.  The parking lot was blanketed by what appeared to be about three feet of snow.  I made my way to the guard shack in a near state of shock.  I don’t remember talking to the guards, but probably did, and then trudged to where my car was once visible, a rear-wheel drive Buick Skylark, pretty much useless in snowy conditions.

I had a shovel in the car, and, thankfully, a full bottle of wine, nicely chilled in the wintry conditions.  I first cleared the tail pipe, started the car and turned the radio on to try to get up to speed on what had been happening while I continued to make efforts to liberate my vehicle from its imprisoned state.

That took an hour.

Driving a rear-wheel drive car in the snow belt is a bit of an art that I had gotten much better at over the years.  I managed to make my way out of the parking lot, commencing the short drive to my apartment.  The streets were somewhat passable, but when I arrived at the small parking lot behind my 3-decker, there was a piece of large heavy equipment – a front-loader, I’d say – moving mountains of snow around the parking lot.  Not wanting to interfere, I decided to flee by attempting the 12-mile drive to my parents’ house in Atkinson, NH.

I’d heard on the radio that the interstates were shut down, so I dutifully attempted one of my back roads methods of getting there.  That worked well for a while, but I eventually came to an impasse of unplowed roads and had to double back.  I decided to ignore the highway shutdown order and hopped on I-495 North.  By then I had finished the wine but still felt totally alert due to the emergency conditions.  And then the Mass State Police pulled me over!  Active alcoholism produces an amazing ability to tell intricate lies without skipping a beat, so I gave the officer my working-in-a-computer-room-all-night-with-no-radio-reception story – which was actually true! – but then fabricated that I still had no knowledge that the highways were shut down.  He seemed to buy the story and let me go, even with the empty bottle of wine openly visible on the floorboard beside me.  I’m sure he had more important things to do.

By now the sun was rising.  I made it to the base of my parents’ street and got stuck.  I could see in the distance my father and brothers shoveling the driveway.  They saw me and came by to give me a push.  I got into their driveway – three hours to dig out and drive twelve miles – and crawled into bed.  I felt bad that I wasn’t up to helping them with the shoveling, but all I could do was sleep.