Backing Up On Ice

Backing Up On Ice

Have you ever driven a car or truck with a trailer attached? And did you try to back-up with that trailer attached? I’ll bet almost everyone has at one time or another. It’s challenging the first time and it takes a long time for it to get less challenging. I’m sure a neurologist can explain why our brains are not wired to easily handle doing things in reverse with lots of physics involved due to radial arms and turning radius and pivot points and God knows whatever else I am missing in the description of that equation. Objects in the mirror may appear closer than they are, as both Meatloaf and your car mirror say so eloquently, but even that is an added confusion factor in backing up a trailer. Just look in the mirror at your face and then ask yourself if that mole or hair part is on the correct side. I bet you, like me, have to occasionally reach up and touch your face and watch yourself do it in the mirror before you are certain you are looking at your right or left side. Now take your iPhone and take a selfie and do the same thing. Does the photograph take your picture as though it is in a mirror or is it showing you your face the way others would see it? Not easy, right?

Now let’s talk about driving a car on ice. Even if you didn’t grow up watching Ice Road Truckers, you know that when you go into a skid (this works pretty much the same on hard pavement as on ice only ice exaggerates the situation by virtue of taking much of the friction out of the equation) you are supposed to turn the wheels into the skid to regain control of the vehicle. That is also a counter-intuitive thing, especially if there is a steep cliff and great danger in the offing. But those of us raised to live in snow-country have had to learn how to drive on ice and snow and learning how to handle a skid is Lesson #1 if you don’t want to spend your life waiting for AAA every time you go to buy a quart of milk. Ithaca, the place of my origin and where I went to college, is a hilly area that is the result of a glacial moraine where the Finger Lakes were crafted by the natural process of a massive receding glacier after the last major ice age. Part of the “trench” formed by the receding glacier became Cayuga Lake and the other very deep lakes that form the fingers, but the rest of the trench formed the hills that surround the lakes in what is otherwise mildly hilly or flat Upstate New York countryside. Water flows to its level and that means that the streams and rivers tend to run into the lakes based on gravity and the terrain and over the millennia they have cut the gorges into those surrounding hills so that the water could get to the lake. It is what makes Ithaca “Gorgeous”.

But those hills also make for some interesting driving experiences. I recall once driving my car in Cayuga Heights, just off the Cornell campus while I was in graduate school. It was a frigid early morning so I was probably on my way to pick up my friend on the way to class at good old Mallott Hall. I started up a long hill and suddenly realized that the ice on the hill was so slick and the road crews had yet to salt or sand the road, that I started to lose traction. Losing traction as you head up a long hill is one of the nightmare driving-in-snow-country scenarios. I didn’t so much as skid as start to shimmy across the road and towards the ditch. I had to stop accelerating to stop the sideways movement of the car and it caused me to immediately start to slowly slip backwards down the hill. That’s when I came to the realization that what’s worse for the brain than sorting through the physics of turning into a skid is trying to figure out how to grapple with a backwards skid, I’m not certain, but I think there are three reversals that happen here. There is the turn into a skid program, the do everything backwards since you are heading the wrong way program and then, just to make your sphincter really clench tight, there is the do it while looking in the rear-view mirror where everything is both closer than it seems or not and reversed or not depending on your cognitive strengths at that split second. That is the purest definition of sensory overload that can exist unless perhaps you were being waterboarded while all of this was going on.

At some point in a backwards skidding situation you tend to just give up and let whatever happens happen since anything you do has a fifty-fifty chance of making matters worse. Now add a trailer into the situation. Holy-mother-of-God, that is a nightmare on steroids that I have never actually experienced, but I’m sure those Ice Road Truckers have once or twice.

Speaking of the debate last night and final days of this massively important presidential election cycle, I am in sensory overload and have almost totally lost my ability of cognitive problem-solving. I wasn’t sure last night if I wanted to scream and at whom to scream. And unlike the first debate, which everyone agreed was a train-wreck that almost everyone agreed was beyond help, this debate was like a slow-motion backwards skid with a trailer where I never felt like I was in adrenaline-pumping fear of imminent knee-jerk harm, but where the inevitability of disaster due to the eventual outcome from my lack of control was likely to land me in the ditch if I’m lucky and over the cliff if I’m not. And the worst part of it all is that I have no idea how to make one outcome more likely and more palatable than the other.

Such is the sense I get as we near the election. I know Trump can’t win, but no one seems ready to acknowledge that with certainty. We were all too wrong in 2016 to grant us that comfort. I watched a Lincoln Project ad this morning that has a mother coming into a dark room to wake her child to tell him that Trump won again and we then learn that its for a third term because the kid says to his mother, “I didn’t think he could run more than twice?” There is no way that kid is getting back to sleep after that. I’m just glad I saw the ad this morning and not last night. And if we go to the optimistic side of the situation and we say that Biden wins, we have the likelihood that he and his Republican cronies will contest it and he will spend months barricading himself into the White House until we find a way to remove him and take him down. And even if the win is by a veritable landslide and Trump cannot get away with recount or delay tactics, there is the militant wing of the Trump base to worry about. I watched the new Borat movie last night (and to show you how desperate I am, I HATE Borat). I wanted to see the Rudy Giuliani piece in the hotel room with his hand in his pants (what a sleaze bag…and no matter what he says, he was caught in full flagrante delicto). But Borat also visits with some very stupid, but very scary, QAnon guys who are fully into their conspiracy theories and cannibalistic pedophilial fever with a chaser of pro-Trump Hu-Ha. It is this crowd that I worry might find a convincing and overwhelming Biden win to be grounds for activating their mercenary anti-establishment dreams and storming the castle, so to speak.

So which is the ditch and which is the cliff? I have a very clear sense that getting Trump out of office is a matter of not allowing the country to go off a cliff, much like the Lincoln Project ad depicts. But I also know that the QAnon ditch is back there and I am unlikely to avoid it one way or the other. So I am letting the wheel go and allowing the car and trailer to jackknife hopefully only into the ditch. I still have my AAA membership and that wait beats drinking heavily and having to call the other AAA when we are all over the cliff.