STORIES FROM THE STORM
A Widow Bit – Dec. 21, 2008
By Mary Koch

            It was something like a 2008 version of the 1956 movie, “Bus Stop.” As in the movie, we were travelers waiting out a snow storm. The movie bus stop was a bare-bones, rural café, but it had Marilyn Monroe. Our port in the storm was a Best Western motel lobby. No Marilyn, but fresh strawberries and waffles.

            I’d been westbound, trying to get to Tacoma to spend a few days with my mother. Despite my front-wheel drive and studded tires, I was turned back at the approach to Snoqualmie Pass. They wanted chains; I don’t do chains.

            I returned to Cle Elum and decided to hunker down. Consequently, I had nothing dramatic to tell the next morning at breakfast. The other folks – the  westbound ones who had made it over the pass – they had the stories. Usually, Snoqualmie is a 45-minute breeze. That night it had been hours of clenched-jawed, tight-gripped driving with no visibility and frozen windshield wipers, punctuated by the occasional vehicle in the ditch.

            There was a young father from San Diego with two kids, the youngest three months. He had the kind of sculptured hairdo and tattoos that might have made me judge him negatively. He’d done everything right: new tires, chains, even movies on his laptop to keep his pre-schooler engaged. The ice on the roadway was so rough, it chewed up his new tires. He ended up huddled with his family on the side of the road, waiting for a tow.  That morning, he was fixing a plate for his wife so she and the baby could have breakfast in bed.

            There was the family driving U-Haul trucks and trailers in tandem. Their 82-year-old mother, a recent widow, had just lost her home to a tax foreclosure.  They’d been up all the night before the storm packing 82 years worth of possessions, which they were hauling to eastern Washington, where Mom will resettle.

            By chance, there were longtime friends. They’d chosen the same motel as refuge, and we laughed at the coincidence. They were on their way home from California after seeing their son through risky surgery for brain cancer. He was doing so well, they beamed, that he’d sent them home. From one storm into the next.

            There was the young couple, both U.S. Army medics from Fort Lewis, on their way home to Iowa. Nearly three months pregnant, she admitted she’d been hysterical as they’d inched their way through the blizzard. She dreaded the road ahead. Basic training, she said, was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she’d take that any day over Snoqualmie Pass.

            “Well, Snoqualmie Pass is behind you,” I said. Mostly I listened as she cried and talked. She hugged me before climbing back into the car.

            By noon, all were back on the road. I wonder about the next chapter in their stories, especially the young Army medics. I pray their story ends as all stories should: “And they lived happily ever after.”