It’s not often that I reconsider living in Pennsylvania. But when a storm that brings Jim Cantore (of The Weather Channel fame) to the Lehigh Valley for storm coverage, I quickly came to realize that my hometown was likely to disappear within a few short hours.

Winter Storm Gail dropped about a foot of snow on Northeast Pennsylvania, and it was pretty to watch while it fell. By the following morning, we had all come to truly understand that this wasn’t the light and fluffy stuff. This was the heavy, wet stuff that basically drives chiropractic practices through the winter.

I own a business doing IT services for small businesses, so I was able to get a work van at a steal from a good friend of mine, and while it’s a 20-year-old hunk-o-junk Chevy work van, it’s a hunk-o-junk that has my logo all over it and serves as a fantastic billboard.

Anyway, I made the mistake of parking the van on the arterial state road in front of my house. I figured it would be safe, since the plows were going to come by, and we’ve had decently light snows in the recent few years. I was going to be able to start up the van, maybe spin the wheels a bit, but ultimately get out withour issue. Turns out that I was very wrong.

Nearly a week after the storm, I’ve finally dug out my van, and got it out of its space through a small amount of casual shoveling and an impressive six-point “K” turn on the roadway. Once I got onto the road, I basically hooked a 270-degree turn from my parking space to the side road from which I can access my driveway, all while oncoming traffic was slowing down just enough to avoid colliding with me.

So now that I got the van up and moving again, it was time to do the normal things: clean out the mounds of packing material and other whatnot that have accumulated in the van over the past few weeks that it was in use, let the battery charge for a bit, and clear all the check engine lamps. I ended up running a couple errands and came back to the house. That’s when the fun began.

As I noticed that the snow was melting pretty gracefully, I decided to park atop the snow and basically let the van compress it down. I wanted to also make sure that I was decently close to the curb, so I made sure that I kept the wheel turned to the right and hugged the curb. And then I hugged the curb a little too much. Somehow, I ended up with my rear wheels on the curb in the snowbank, which had started to turn into compressed ice. How did I even beach my van backwards?

What came from this point forward was nothing short of sad to watch, and I’m glad that the folks walking to and from the nearby bank paid no mind to me while I made a complete fool of myself. During this process of trying to get out of my parking space, I learned a few important things:

  • Dropping a 2.5 ton work van into neutral to try to rock and push it from behind is a downright stupid idea.
  • Trying to do anything with the van while on flat land but embedded into ice will get you nowhere.
  • Rear-wheel drive vehicles seemingly don’t care about how much traction you have on the front.
  • I can invent new swear words on the fly when put into a stressful situation.

I’m not sure what I did to finally get out of there, but I think it was a lot of spinning the wheel, a little bit of dropping rock salt under the rear tires, and a bit of screaming along with System of a Down as I tried desperately to end my embarrassment. But what I can say is that when I finally had that moment of “omg, it gripped the road!,” I made sure to park that behemoth on solid and dry land.

And since I’m severely limited in how many vehicles I can put on my driveway, this experience finally gave me enough encouragement to finally shovel the curbside parking lane on my side of the road.

While I don’t regret living where I do, because I love it here, I do regret not making enough of an effort to pick up and store the free snowblower that I was offered a few years back, well before I would have a house on a corner with way too much sidewalk for my liking.

Until I can get my hands on a snowblower, I’m going to keep my chiropractor gainfully employed.