Continued from Part Two.

The next blizzard started as soon as I hit Western Massachusetts. This one was a complete whiteout. Big, dry walls of snowflakes opposite from the heavy, wet, slick dump that occurred in Northern Vermont two days previous. The throttle on the old Golf held true and didn’t stick, although it was all I thought about as I pushed forward at five miles per hour, sometimes ten.

The trek from outside of Boston to Carlisle, PA should have taken around six to seven hours factoring in piss breaks and stopping for gas. After lunch with the ex, I called my friend, Yeti, from a payphone, and told him I was due to show up on his doorstep around eight o’clock at night.

“Cool,” he said. “We can go get some beers.”

It took four hours to crawl through the small bit of New York and once I hit the Eastern side of Pennsylvania the visibility went to absolute zero. A screen of white. Approximating the position of the road where I assumed to drive was the hardest part aide from not freaking out. Every so often a pair of red taillights peering through the squall helped me stay on track and not lose hope. On occasion an eighteen wheeler semi-truck or an enormous snowplow would pass me, blaring the deep air horn, spraying a massive gout of slush, salt, and snow over the windshield of the Golf. The wipers would stop for a moment and I would panic a moment before the little champions summoned the strength to somehow begin again and push the load off to the side in one great heap.

I drove on for over twelve hours. Still smoking with the window rolled down a crack, the flurry and cold pouring in. The Golf’s heater was magnificent, partially because those models were prone to overheating. The interior a small furnace, a beacon of hope against the weather. When it grew dark, the road became more discernible. My headlights found me the rest of the way through to Carlisle.

I arrived at seven in the morning exhausted, hungry, bleary eyed from sixteen hours on the road. I found my friend’s apartment and knocked on the door. He didn’t answer. I pounded and pounded until he arrived, furry and reeking of booze in his boxer shorts.

After a short conversation it was clear he was still drunk. He grunted toward the couch, stumbled back to his bedroom, and I crashed.