Driving Through Hell

Keep Going

“If you're going through hell, keep going.”
-Winston Churchill

I told my wife I thought we should leave at eight o'clock. We were on vacation going to my niece's wedding as well as visiting my family who still live near the town where I grew up, in one of America's truly most beautiful, remote, yet surprisingly cultured, relaxed, wealthy, and still touristy backwaters. My wife wanted to leave at eleven. She wanted to take our time, have breakfast, drink some coffee, take the morning to pack and then be checked out of our serene cabin on the lake, and hit the road by eleven. My problem with this plan was that we were looking at a thirteen to fourteen hour car ride and we have three young children, all of whom hate sleeping and never would, if we, their tyrant parents, didn't force them into it every night. My reasoning was, if they're hopped up on vacation excitement, fast food, and road trip sugar, they aren't going to sleep, and that would mean a lot of yelling the last three to five hours all while driving through Chicago around midnight, which sounded a lot to me like a drive into hell. What I didn't realize was the very real hell I unknowingly set myself and the rest of my family up for, when I talked my wife into leaving at eight o'clock.

The morning before we left we went to my favorite diner. It was a place I went every Sunday with my dad and my grandma after we brought her to church. The place hadn't changed since I was a kid thirty years ago. Memories assailed me of conversations blurred by time sitting right here with dad and Grandma, both now long passed. The TVs on the wall were muted, but they were playing the Weather Channel. And there on display, they were warning about severe storms in the Midwest the following day, the day we were set to leave. They were predicting a tornado in the exact region our house was in, all the way to Chicago between the hours of eight in the morning to eight at night.

I thought, even then, we might be pushing it a little close if we left by eight, but it being a thirteen to fourteen hour drive, and storms being unpredictable, I was pretty confident it would blow over before we got there. I was wrong.

We ended up packing and taking off exactly at eight o'clock Eastern Standard Time, which was seven o'clock Central Time. Another warning alarm went off in my head but there was nothing we could do about whatever the weather was going to be, so there was no reason to listen to the warning bell, particularly when I had already fought and won to leave by eight.

I drove the whole way while my wife entertained the children with everything from little dollar presents she had bought and wrapped for this purpose before the trip, with treats, even with Bluey at one point, played on our fancy van’s fancy fold down TV. The kids were great the whole trip, even the baby only occasionally whined and cried before naps, but otherwise everyone got along great, the van held up, everything was going really well, and I was shaving time off the whole drive before we hit Ohio and the first minor catastrophe.

The reason I was so nervous about hitting bad weather, other than the obvious, was because my van's wipers are painfully slow. They only have four settings, and even when you get to the fastest, it takes about a full second to a second and a half to do one full back and forth swipe. I was concerned about what that would mean for a really heavy rain. I was about to find out! First in Ohio.

We were almost to Cleveland when the rain started. First with a sprinkle which quickly turned into a downpour. My wipers held up okay. I had to slow down to forty mph and put on my hazards, but, even though I was going slower than a lot of other drivers, everyone slowed way down and I was only passed occasionally, mostly by big rigs. Then the rain went from a downpour to a full on monsoon. It was buckets and buckets of water and my poor little wipers which, up to that point, had been the little wipers that could, finally gave up. I couldn't see at all. So, I pulled over for the storm to pass, still with my hazards on, and saw multiple other people make the same decision in front and behind me.

The kids were great. The seven year old asked a lot of questions a little nervously, but she was still okay. We answered them reassuringly, and the storm passed after five or ten minutes. We got back on the road, the sky opened up, and we headed out without another hitch the whole way. Until we got to Chicago.

By the time we reached Chicago, I had shaved an entire hour off our destination time, and I was feeling pretty good about myself that we'd be getting in by eight or eight thirty. (And for all the people still with me up to this point, who I was about to lose because they were thinking if I left at eight, and it's a thirteen to fourteen hour trip, and I shaved off an hour, how am I thinking I'm going to get home at eight or eight thirty? All I'm going to say to you is, I don’t know. It's all got to do with gaining an hour going from East Coast time into Central Time, with the time zone difference, and also I don't get math, alright? I said it.) We stopped in Indiana, right before South Bend, but only for twenty minutes, and even with that stop we were projecting getting home around eight thirty.

As we drove nearer and nearer to Chicago, the clouds darkened. What had been a peaceful evening drive quickly turned into a dark and ominous, full blown nighttime journey. But it was still only seven o'clock in June. The sun doesn't set here until around eight thirty or so. We got into the far outskirts of Chicago and the lightning started. Not in the distance, and not a single, quick, brilliant, white strobe, gone as soon as it was seen. This was chain lightning, it hit in our area, and it was eerily gold and stayed for a full second before disappearing again into the night sky, only to appear again. And then it streaked sideways across the sky, showing my wife the fast blowing and circling clouds that had totally covered and darkened the sky. Being a native midwesterner, my wife knew what that all meant, but kept it to herself.

I did not see the clouds, as the outskirts of Chicago turned suddenly into its heart, and somehow I found myself still in rush hour traffic. The traffic worsened as we went along and then it started to sprinkle. It's at this point I should mention that, although we had our phones, we were relying on printed out directions instead of the GPS. Which meant we doubly had to be looking out for signs, and the trouble if we missed our exit would compound into even more of a chaotic mess. The sprinkling, just as it had in Ohio, quickly turned to rain. Eighteen wheelers pressed in on both sides and my visibility dropped nearly to nil. Just as suddenly as before, the rain turned into buckets.

Water poured down my windshield as though we were in a car wash and the only thing I could see were the blurred lights of the cars in front of me with nanosecond flashes of partial, limited sight. Everyone slowed around me just as before, but unlike before, there was no shoulder to pull onto if things worsened. And they did. They worsened. I went into a crawl at twenty miles an hour and was just as blind. At one point I think the slowest I got to was 15 mph in rush hour Chicago traffic, and still, I couldn't see. In times of crisis and high stress, and I don’t know why, I only have two modes: yelling and whispering. I didn’t want to upset my wife, so I whispered. “Do you think I should pull over?” “What?” She asked. “Do you think I should pull over? There’s not much of a shoulder.” I whispered again. Finally, overhearing what I said, she replied, “No. There’s no shoulder! You have to keep going.”

There was nothing else I could do. So, heeding her very sound advice, I just kept driving, most often with at least one semi to my side and a prayer in my racing heart.

I couldn't distinguish the lines on the road, the whole driving experience became a patchwork of basic guesstimation with milliseconds of partial, limited glimpses with which to make the next life or death decision on. After five to ten actual minutes of this, the buckets lightened into a downpour, and still going slowly, I could briefly see once in a while, again. Relief consumed me. I have never been so happy and grateful simply to be able to use the sense of sight. I was able to speed up to forty, and instead of a river running down my windshield, I only had big, beautiful drops of rain. Soon I sped up to fifty and the raindrops decreased to mist and I basked in knowing we had gotten through the worst of it, or so we thought.

My wife and I joked around a little and then she dropped the bomb that while I had gone through the worst driving experience of my life by far, she had been researching the storm and found out it was a tornado. She joked and said we should make up a shirt that read: I'm a real midwesterner now, because I drove through a tornado in Chicago. Then she told me it was unusual for Chicago to get tornados, which, although I didn't know, I was so elated by my newfound sense of sight, I barely heard.

We looked up and the clouds looked like they were light and white, billowing into towers, still covering the sky above where we were. I turned off the wipers. Everything was going pretty well. There were still deeply dark clouds all around us, but we figured we were headed out of the storm, now. We were wrong.

After about five or ten minutes the sky darkened again. We drove out from beneath our white, stormless clouds and started going back into the darkness. We hit our exit, still driving us West and out of Chicago, when it started to sprinkle again. We got onto the on ramp just as the sky above us glowered back into night and the same golden lightning from before started noiselessly striking the earth somewhere in the distance ahead of us. The rain quickly turned into a downpour and the downpour into a river over our windshield for the third time that day. This time, though, I had already been through the worst of it, and now was heading into it with the eyes of a veteran instead of those of the newbie replacement I had been fifteen minutes before. Plus, this road had wide shoulders, so I was only completely stressed out now, instead of experiencing the full, silent, jibbering terror I had before. I got over into the lane closest to the shoulder and was soon joined by most of my fellow, newly appointed, full midwesterner drivers.

We drove like that for about five minutes, going slower and slower into the second tornado of the night. We hit the twenty mph range, when suddenly the full blast of the eery wail of the city’s tornado sirens hit us, as we slowly drove through a Hanz Zimmer apocalypse scene of Chicago. Finally it got so bad we had to pull over. There was an exit half a mile away. We drove through the river on the windshield and the road, while the sirens howled around us, the lightning occasionally strobed and the thunder rolled around the van.

I followed the brilliant, lit up white line of the shoulder all the way to the exit. Once there, we were able to drive slow enough, somewhere in the teens, to actually be able to see. I was listening to my wife's directions but missed our turn in the confusion and parked in the first place I could find to safely pull into, which turned out to be the city's salt yard for putting salt in the backs of their plows.

We waited in the empty parking lot that was covered in open salt sheds as my wife thought about the hospital parking lot we could’ve been in right now, or even somewhere in Indiana, probably, if I had just listened to her at all that day. We stayed looking out at the storm rage for about ten or fifteen minutes. The sirens switched off, and the windshield’s river turned back into rain. Once we discerned the individual raindrops, we decided to go. The storm had finally, really, let up. I couldn't see the road clearly, and made some crazy turns, but we somewhat quickly made it back to our road after navigating the suburban turnaround, which generally consists of making three left turns and one full turnaround in a parking lot, before getting back to the place you need to be.

Once we made it back to our road, my wife saw a rainbow, and we knew the storm was actually over this time. Up ahead, the sun was starting to set, and its rays lit up the clouds around it, ahead and West of us, into pure, actual gold. There were a few patches of broken up clouds where we could even glimpse a small patch of pale blue sky which glimmered hope and safety, even in its smallness. But it paled in comparison to the glorious golden clouds we were driving towards. The scene took our breath away for sheer splendor and magnificence. It was as though we were driving ever closer to the heaven ahead of us while hell lurked and glowered behind. I could still look in the mirrors and see three quarters of the sky blackened and shrouded in storm, flashes of lightning occasionally and silently struck back there, but the glory we drove into wrapped us in a lasting, peaceful serenity all the way home