Whiteout

The Whiteout
My most memorable experience with nature took place last winter. I was traveling to Thiel College for a football recruiting visit. Thiel College is located in Northern Pennsylvania about two hours away from my house. My father was driving us in his truck towards the college early that Saturday morning in February, and the skies were clear and the roads were dry. The trip up seemed normal at first, as it was expectedly very cold out and also very windy. It began snowing very lightly when we got about halfway through our trip. As we progressed further toward Thiel College, the weather became worse and a lot more dangerous to drive in. I received a phone call from the Thiel football coach who told me that we should probably turn around and head back home. He said that there was a whiteout up where they were. As we neared our exit off of Interstate 79 North, the weather took an immediate turn for the worse. We began to drive along a country road. The next hour was spent trying to find our way through a phenomenon of nature in the form of a blinding snowstorm known as a whiteout, which affected me because of the power of nature, the danger of the experience, and the lesson of survival that I came away with that day.

The power of nature can be suprisingly sudden and unpredictable. I have experienced the beauty and quiet of nature many times before. However, I had only experienced the power of nature in the form of disasters such as the high winds of tornadoes, the deadly currents and waves of hurricanes, and the extreme temperatures and snowfalls of blizzards in news stories on television. That all changed with the sudden change in weather that February day. Up until then, I could only try to imagine what it would be like to be exposed to the extremes of nature. At first I wasn’t really concerned about the whiteout because I never experienced one before and I underestimated the severity of it. Also, at the time when the coach called, it wasn’t snowing very badly where we were. Therefore, we decided to keep on driving and hope that it would pass through before we got there. However, we were wrong. When we turned off the highway we entered on to a smaller road. We traveled down that road for about one or two miles until we literally could not see more than three feet in front of us. All of a sudden I realized that we were in trouble. My dad immediately turned the car around and headed back. While we were traveling back, we both had our heads out the window trying to see the road. I was amazed at how the wind did not stop continuously blowing the snow all around our truck. It took us about an hour before we were able to drive out of the whiteout area and see clearly again. There was a lot of debate going on between my father and me as we were trying to understand the severity of our situation, and make decisions regarding our safety. My first experience with the awesome power of nature was truly becoming a memorable experience.

It is a dangerous experience whenever you feel the helplessness of being in the presence of something very powerful in nature such as a total whiteout. I began to sense these feelings whenever I could not see more than three feet in front of us, and the winds and snow kept steadily blowing across the front of our truck. We had to worry about turns in the road and other vehicles. If we failed to recognize a turn in the road, we could drive into a tree or pond, as well as hitting any one of a whole lot of other objects. In order to help ourselves, my father and I rolled our windows down, so that we could listen for other vehicles, because my Dad was especially fearful that another vehicle would hit us. The option to just sit still and let the whiteout pass was discussed, but we both agreed that it didn’t feel safe to put the car in park because we did not know exactly where we were, and because nobody else would be able to see us until it was too late. Also, we definitely did not think it was a good idea to park the car and get out of it and walk off the road. I remember the feeling of a sense of continuous danger throughout that whiteout experience, which will serve as a lasting reminder to me of the power of nature.

Looking back at that experience, I learned a valuable lesson on how to survive a sudden and unexpected situation. Having never even heard of a whiteout, let alone ever seeing one, we were learning as we went through the event. Nature was not going to wait for us to feel comfortable with the whiteout. My father and I could not depend on our vision to find our way to safety. As a result, we called on our other senses such as hearing in order to increase the awareness of our surroundings and find our way out of the whiteout to safety. During the time we were stuck in the whiteout I was actually very worried that we could possibly get trapped in or even worse get hit by another car because even with the lights on, we could not see anything. Even the thought of leaving the car parked on the side of the road was dangerous, because the visibility was zero and other vehicles could not possibly know if they were completely on the road or not. In addition, there were many large eighteen wheeler trucks on and near the interstate that day. It was a very dangerous situation and one that I underestimated a lot. If we would have been cautious and smart about the situation we would have heeded the warning of the football coach, and we would not have even attempted to continue on our trip. Fortunately, we made good decisions to safely overcome the whiteout and learn a valuable lesson on the type of respect and thought process necessary to survive the sudden onset of the power of nature.

In conclusion, the power of nature is something that cannot be fully understood until we experience it. That is when we will truly realize how scared that we will become whenever we are finding ourselves in great danger. From this experience I learned that nature can be very dangerous because we were almost trapped in the whiteout and could have possibly been hit by another vehicle. There is no easy or obvious way to safety in the midst of a whiteout. Decisions are made to attempt to reach safety, but I now realize that for the most part, we were at the mercy of the power of nature and would only be truly safe whenever the whiteout phenomena passed our location. Who knows how long that storm would have lasted? It is possible that we could have been trapped in an isolated location for a whole day or even longer. This situation certainly could have easily been life threatening, but we were lucky and survived the whiteout without damage to our vehicle or injury to ourselves. We may not be so lucky the next time. As a result, it is imperative that in the future we pay extra close attention to weather reports and take precautions to avoid placing ourselves in these types of situations. It is most amazing to me how sudden nature can change from something very ordinary and familiar to something very powerful, dangerous, and uncertain.