'Tis the season

"Snow-covered roads were blamed for several fender-benders reported throughout the CBRM on Sunday, and at about 12:40 p.m., RCMP and firefighters were called to a vehicle rollover on Kelly’s Mountain after a 68-year-old woman was trapped inside her vehicle. After being freed from the wreckage, the woman, who was lone occupant of the Chevrolet Cavalier, was transported to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital with a head injury."

http://www.capebretonpost.com/News/Local/2010-11-21/article-1983560/Wintry-weather-results-in-rash-of-car-accidents/1

My Aunt (the author featured on page 4 if you care to call that PDF).  Her car pitch-polled three times (I didn't even know that a car could be made to do that), and one of her brothers reportedly said, "Anyone who came out of that car alive should count it a good day."  As of this post, she is expected to recover, but the hospital staff was needing to do another CAT scan of her head this morning before they would state her condition with confidence.  At any rate, everyone who prays or crosses fingers or does whatever is hoping for her recovery. 

It may seem pretty stupid for anyone to attempt travel in these conditions, but she was on her way to visit her dying father, 325 miles from home and not anticipating this kind of weather.  Pic from the URL above.

I haven't driven on Nova Scotian roads in the winter since 1987.  Every year I generate a lot of idyllic photographs of the place in summer, but it can be an absolute nightmare in the off-season.  Lawrence has a loose goal of one day going up there in the winter so that he and Grandaddy can cross-country ski.  I'm iffy on that whole plan.  I'm less worried about car accidents than stranding: sometimes when the snow comes down, you simply can't (or shouldn't) go anywhere for a few hours or a few days, and it can be almost impossible to predict when the weather will turn, so you can easily get caught out in it.  That kind of thing is manageable if one stays within one's limits, but the constraints can wreck a carefully-planned vacation (inaccessible destinations, cancelled flights, ...ugh...).  Mother Nature still trumps in such places in a way that is not within the routine experience of urban Americans. 

On the back of this Polaroid (the only camera I could afford at the time, and only because I had a full-time job the summer before), I wrote,
"December 14, 1982, ten degrees below zero"