Live and Learn

Heading over Teton Pass recently in a raging snow storm, I am reminded of an earlier time coming over this same pass in 1979 as a greenhorn.  We were 21, indefatigable, indestructible east coast preppies and we were trying to make it back to Jackson Hole from Targhee during a fierce storm in my big old 1969 Country Squire Station Wagon.  ‘The Green Monster’, as we called it, was a stripped down version without the wood panels or the backwards barf seats in the rear, but it was mine, it was paid for and it was a beast.  The FM converter was blasting some bootleg Grateful Dead out of Jackson and the car was littered with beers, boots, burgers, skis, a shovel and one sleeping bag.  We may have been young and dumb ski bums but we were not stupid. 

On our first try over the pass, we stalled halfway up behind some conservative old guy in a boxy silver Volvo with New Hampshire plates who foolishly slowed and stopped when he could not see anymore.  ‘Live Free or Drive’ we yelled at him. With only rear wheel drive we could not continue the climb without good momentum, so we backed into a U-turn, getting out to push our car and help the frightened New Englander do the same, and we headed back down in defeat towards the calm flats near Victor and Driggs, Idaho.   

Not to be dismayed, at the bottom of the grade we pulled another Kojack style U-turn and headed back to the pass at full speed.  I positioned my three passengers and all our equipment in the back over the rear wheels for maximum traction.  As we came around a blind corner, we saw a guy in a bus driver’s uniform taking a pee in the roadside snowbank.  WTF we thought, before it was a thing.  When we came around the next corner, we found his bus stuck in the snowbank on the right side of the road with all its passengers milling about helplessly in the road and on the shoulder.  Knowing we could not stop I started beeping the horn wildly and waving frantically as they scrambled and jumped into the safety of the snowbank.   

My buddies were howling in the back, praying and pushing down with all their weight on the spinning rear wheels.  We barely made it over the Teton pass successfully on that second try and coasted sown past the Glory chute and into the Jackson Motel-6 ($13.99?) just in time for happy hour and Gong Show reruns.  Persistence pays.  Youth is not wasted on the young, it is a prerequisite.  

Now I’m heading north to Montana for another ski trip in a modern, four-wheel-drive German sedan. I feel that I have come a long way in 40 years of driving and skiing and living in the north, snow country.  The road is bad but the car is good and I make my way up and down Teton pass towards Driggs.  I am passed only by local contractors with super beefy, studded Wyoming snow tires that grip and rip the ice.  Those guys aren’t kidding.

The snowplow drivers are out closing roads in the Teton River valley, with big gates at critical intersections, but they allow me thru with a wink and a nod, ‘at my own risk’.  I make my way towards Henrys Fork, Island Park and Montana, but the last cop in Ashton Idaho says the road is closed over the top and there is no way I’m going up.  So, I double back to Rexburg to hit the Freeway, the only way north for a hundred miles.   The freeway is open with a one lane ice rink heading north into the dark winter weather and people are cowardly bailing off the exits and accidentally into the center divider, likes rats from a burning ship.  After a while I am all alone, heading north into the mouth of the beast storm.

The Freeway is sketchy, at best, with blowing ground-snow and white-out conditions.  Visibility is 50 feet and at times going over the Mon-Ida pass I am completely blinded by a full face-shot, for what seems like 5-10 seconds.  None-the-less when I look down at the speedometer, I am going 60 mph along with a white knuckle trucker that are foolishly following me.  It is Montana after all, where the speed limit is -  ‘Safe and Prudent’.  What does that Mean?

It is high stress driving and I have to pee like a racehorse, but I don’t dare slow or stop at the exit or on the soft shoulder.  I soldier on, for what seems like hours,  until somewhere near Lima Montana, I pop out of the cloud cover and the snow slows to a mere blizzard.  I can see mountains and blue skies and a few other cars and I know that I have been miraculously delivered, once more.  I stop to pee and stretch and count my lucky stars.  I make my way towards civilization and a friend’s house for a weekend skiing the frigid ma and pa resorts of Montana.  Persistence pays off again.  Live and learn.  Or not.