Lenten Journey Day 2: High and Dry

Ceding Control, Gaining Trust In The Snows of Wyoming

I never thought I’d be so happy to see Nebraska.

For one thing, it was flat, more flat, and flat again – far and calm cry from what the three of us had experienced a couple hours earlier, with our daughter Madeleine behind the wheel of my CR-V, towing a U-Haul 4x8 trailer over the highest reaches of Interstate 80 in southeastern Wyoming – a region of the country that attracted tough trappers and trailblazers like Jim Bridger, a Virginia native who, in the mid-1800s, ventured west, became a renowned trader, trapper and trailblazing army scout. He was also colorful raconteur, a fair but ruthless businessman who battled Mormon settlers, and a peacemaker with local native tribal leaders (he also married three native women). Bridger warned one white military type after another not to go to war with such folks. He was a complicated dude whose name lives on throughout the state. Fort Bridger, a town in southwest Wyoming, is named after him; so is an entire mountain range to the northeast.

Anyway, Madeleine opted to drive the morning stretch through Wyoming after we pulled out of a frigid Rock Springs, where we overnighted after covering 700 miles from Reno on the first day of our run for Chicago. She hadn’t driven at all so far and was eager to do her part. On this day we would knock out 750 miles to Omaha, and she and her mom would drive about 650 of it, leaving only the final 100 miles to me – a huge test for a control freak like me.

Browns Peak and Sugarloaf Mountain in southeast Wyoming

---

But it’s my daughter’s piloting stint that we’ll talk about for years.

Since none of us had experienced this chunk of I-80, we didn’t realize how hazardous the Wyoming portion could be, even under shimmering, cloudless skies, with the latest snowstorm a day or two in the rear-view mirror. She went into it with no fear, while I did my best to breathe, pray under that breath, and look at the surrounding high plains, mesas and mountains with the most feigned dispassion I could manage. In the backseat, my wife was no doubt keeping one eye on the road and one eye on me for signs of the gathering tension and barely contained anxiety with which she was so familiar.

Madeleine was cruising along beautifully through tiny, continental divide-straddling burgs like Point of Rocks, Wamsutter, Red Desert and, clinging to an east-facing mountainside, the picturesque frontier town of Rawlins, the starting point for what my buddy Bill – who had done a four-year stint as a teacher in Rock Springs in the early 1980s – said the locals referred to as “the Snow Chi Minh Trail.” In this case, the snow was already on the ground, glistening gleefully in the sun – and leaving behind a thin skin of black ice on the highway’s shaded stretches as the thermometer struggled to reach into the mid-20s.

As the first flashing road-spanning digital sign announced the probably presence of said ice, I gritted my teeth and bit my tongue as Madeleine found a spot behind an 18-wheeler, crawling up one grade after another with obvious care, which I should have expected. She’s always been a deliberate driver.

Still, I couldn’t resist bleating the words “slow down” a few times, which she was already doing. I also instructed her to shift down into “sport” mode for a lower gear, especially on the downgrade. Then came another uphill pitch, and another, and another, as dozens of giant semis passed us on the left, without a care, bolstered by extreme experience in such conditions. I thought they were nuts.

“I think we’re getting close to the summit,” I said at some point. But this time, “close” meant somewhere in the next 30 miles. The CR-V slipped slightly here and there, drawing from me a quick intake of wind through the teeth, the sssssssssst sound of a balloon losing a battle with a pinhole.

“Slow down!” I repeated. She slowed to a crawl. “We’re only doing 25!” she said, letting me know, without having to say the actual words, that she had it under control, and that I needed to accept it.

Chill out, dad.

Wow. Call it another Lenten lesson – that, at some point, control in any form is a mirage. All one can do is manage the conditions as well as possible, allow for adjustments, stay focused on the moment, and stop imposing your will on the universe. In my experience, that’s tougher for guys to do; we just assume we’re better behind the wheel, or with the TV remote, or whatever. The temptation to step in and “fix it” can be overwhelming, but if we really leveled with ourselves, we’d find that we’re just as liable to make things worse.

Finally the last mountain pass came into view between Laramie and Cheyenne – at 8,600 feet above sea level, the highest point on of the entirety I-80 – and Madeleine negotiated it with aplomb. By then I was a believer in her skills, as if I had any right to doubt them in the first place. “I can add that to my resume,” she said offhandedly.

She continued behind the wheel for a couple more hours, taking us safely to Sidney, well into the Nebraska panhandle, where her mom took over for the next 300 miles. I just sat back and took in the sprawling, snow-covered western Nebraska landscape, slanted imperceptibly toward the east – one fallow cornfield after another, the occasional stand of elm, a small Platte River tributary here, a farmhouse there – the sneaky and silent and altogether undramatic onset of the Great Plains.

Our icy passage through the high steppes of Wyoming faded into the setting sun. We pulled into Omaha in darkness, but once again, I’d been enlightened – and humbled in the best way.