You think you know snow?

Letter from America: J.J. Devaney (Published in the Sligo Weekender, December 13th, 2011

You know you should get off the road when snowploughs begin to overtake you. At first the journey down from my cousins place in Buffalo was a pleasant trip. The dark clouds of foreboding weather had been with me from early morning but I had just figured ‘this is December on the east coast of the US’ and I would surely make Yonkers, NYC with little hassle.

And then came the snow, a little at first. A dusting. Irish snow you could call it. It made the landscape along the motorway look festive.

An hour later and things are far from festive. Following dogmatically to the pronouncements of my Satellite Navigation I am now on Interstate 84 in the mountains between Pennsylvania and New York State with the snow falling fast and heavy.

The snowploughs pass me out and appear to be making no headway. There is now only one other car on I-84 with me. I had past many signs saying ‘Motel: Next Exit’ in the previous hour but I stubbornly resisted such a compromise with the elements. Now there was just one witness on the road to my folly.

I decided if the car in front of me slid off then I would find shelter at the next exit. Almost in slow motion the car in front of me braked hard for some reason and slowly drifted toward a large bank of snow on the side of the road.

The next exit would be my last. At 545pm I took the ‘Promised Land’ exit off Interstate 84 and hoped the place would live up to its name.

‘Promised Land’ was nothing more than a tiny gas station surrounded by trees and mountains. A snowbound desolate place. I parked my car just outside the forecourt and watched as snow engulfed my vehicle inside 10 minutes.

The Pakistani lad who was manning this 24 hour station took a brief break from watching cars slide down the hill outside to inform me that the nearest motel was 20 minutes up-hill from the gas station.

With the phone lines down and my mobile phone refusing to work I was literally stranded. I had no means of contacting my relations in Yonkers to explain my delay.

I decided then to take advice from the next local that pulled into the station. I may have been away from the hazardous highway but the thought of a night in a petrol station in the freezing snow was far from edifying.

That’s when Carol Jackson and her daughter Lana came suddenly into my life and to my rescue. Assuming they were local I explained my situation to them when they pulled in to the gas station.

I couldn’t have imagined the reaction I was about to get. Carol told me to come with them and that they would look after me for the night. I couldn’t believe it. They were en route to a friend’s child’s birthday and told me to come with them. Me? A complete stranger? A foreigner, no less.

Carol simply replied ‘Well we gotta trust that you aren’t an axe murderer now are you?’ I replied quickly to confirm my lack of interest in both axes and murder. And so, up in the snowy mountains of Pennsylvania I made my way with my new found saviours to a party.

Rarely have I had such sudden and unexpected hospitality. At the party I was introduced to everyone. I was given as much food as I could possibly eat and naturally a nice cold beer cooled from the first heavy snow just outside the door.

Some being native New Yorkers, took a sceptical, if funny look at my predicament. ‘Who picks up an Irishman on the side of the road in America who says he is stranded? Said one sage Italian native of Queens New York.  Who indeed?

Not only was I fed and watered for the night but I was given a couch to sleep on by a fire and a wonderful breakfast in the morning before I set out on the now snow free I-84.

I had never met these people before yet they treated me with the hospitality that would be extended to any member of their families. There is a view that American ‘exceptionalism’ is in crisis. That America isn’t the nation it once was.

And perhaps financial woes and costly wars have drained the American spirit but whenever I hear of American exceptionalism I think of Carol and Lana Jackson and the way in which they treated me that cold December night.

It’s the people of America who make it exceptional. I can confirm that high in the snow capped mountains of Pennsylvania exceptionalism is alive and well.