I’m sitting in my office listening to the dry, sharp sound of sleet hitting my roof. It sounds like sand being poured out, except wetter. Somehow my brain knows its nothing as dry and warm as sand from just listening to it. I grew up in Northern Indiana where winter is much more serious than it is here in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been in blizzards in a car and out of it. I’ve stood in the middle of an open field as the white out barreled down on me like a solid wall. Until that moment, I thought darkness, blackness, was the only thing that could steal my sight. I learned that day that white can be just as blinding, and you can be just as lost.
I could have outrun that wall of snow. I saw it coming and I was only yards from the house, but the dog we’d inherited, King, was with me. He was sixty pounds or maybe a little more of white German Shepard/husky mix, but looked like just a white shepherd. We inherited him after he got shot and after my grandmother and I had paid the vet bill, which was a hardship on our finances, I tried to take King back to his home. I started talking about what the veterinarian had told me, the physical therapy that would be needed daily, the walks on leash, the tending of the wound. The man who I’d thought was nice until that moment, looked me dead in the eye and said, he’d take him out and shoot him that he wasn’t going to do any of that. It was too much trouble. I went back to my car where King lay on blankets on the seat and drove him to my home.
My grandmother was not happy when she saw me pull up with the dog still in the car, but when she heard why, she let me make King a bed in the brand-new attached garage where the first car I’d ever owned got to park. She never allowed pets in the house except for once a year on Christmas Day. There were no exceptions, but the garage was insulated, and the bed blankets were thick, and he was half-husky. King was warm and safe with us.
It was my freshman year of college, and I lived at home so my grandmother wouldn’t be alone. I had an 8:00 AM creative writing class that meant I had to get up before dawn every day to do King’s physical therapy, so he didn’t lose the use of his leg. He let me do it even though I know it hurt, just as he’d let me pick him up and put him in the car when I found him bleeding the day he was shot. He’d screamed, but he never offered to bite. The only time he ever bit a human was to protect one of his people. He was a great dog.
When he was well enough, I started walking him in the predawn darkness. I was half asleep sometimes, so I let him lead me through our small town of a hundred people, or out into the fields along the roads. I learned his routes and what dogs were his friends and the ones that weren’t. But mostly, it was just King and me. We got snow storms and blizzards that year. There were mornings that I shoveled out the driveway and it was blown shut before I could finish changing out of the wet clothes into dry ones to drive to college. On those days I called in and said, I can’t get there safely. There were drifts as tall as cars across the highway.
It was bitterly cold that year, and the metal they’d put in King’s leg to save it got cold and he’d start limping and then sit down in the snow and refuse to go on. I’d take my gloves off and put my hands over his leg to warm him up until he could move with less pain, and we’d finish our walk. I’d stopped in the middle of the field to do just that, the snow was over my knees standing, so I’d brushed some of it away so I could kneel down without it covering me as I knelt beside my dog. He was whimpering with the cold in his old wound as I tried to warm him enough for us to finish the walk.
I don’t know if I heard something or if it was like that sense you get about weather, but I looked up and saw a white wall of snow and wind coming our way. It covered the horizon, and it was low and moving fast. I had minutes to run to the house and shelter. We were in a large open space with houses all around, but I knew once the white out hit the chances of missing the houses and heading out into open fields and never finding shelter were high. I had seconds to do the math in my head of risking freezing to death in the storm or running for the house and safety. I could have made it but King couldn’t, he was still too injured to run. I was in judo and in great shape. I could carry him if I had to on flat ground, but I couldn’t do it in knee deep snow and I couldn’t carry him as far as the house. Seconds of me staring at the storm and then down at my dog with his brown eyes looking up at me. I made my choice; I couldn’t leave him. I hunkered down on the far side of him to protect us both from the wind that was coming with the back of my winter coat and prayed it would pass quickly. Some whiteouts are just instances that descend and blow past; if it was that we’d be okay.
The world became white and the wind hit us like a giant was slapping to try and knock us to the ground. I’d never experienced anything like it, and as I huddled by my dog I had no regrets, but I knew we were in trouble. This storm was here to stay, and we could not be out in it and survive. I was maybe a quarter of a mile or less away from several houses and safety. My home was so close, but I couldn’t see anything and King was still too injured to play Lassie for me in the storm. I had been breaking trail for him in the deep snow all morning, he could not lead the way. I had a mental picture of our house before the whiteout happened. I visualized it as hard and solid as I could and prayed. Prayed that I was right, prayed that I wouldn’t miss the house by a few feet and wander out into the storm. Some of the blizzards that year had lasted hours, all night, or most of a day. King and I din’t have that kind of time.
I know that walk didn’t last as long as it felt, but in the white blindness with the world narrowed down to the wind, the driving snow, the air so cold it hurt to breath, and the dog that I was leading behind me as I broke the deepening snow, it felt like forever. At one point King refused to move forward and I almost cried. I pleaded with him that it was just a little farther and prayed that I was right. We’d be okay if we didn’t miss the house. The growing fear was that I had already missed the house and I was urging King out into the storm away from all shelter. Then I ran into the side of the house, the wind and snow as so bad that even standing with my hand on the house I hadn’t seen it. The wind died down for a second, enough for me to orient and head down the side of the house towards the back and the door. I kept one hand on the house and the other on King’s leash. We were almost home, almost safe, but the wind was howling. I had one of those thoughts you get sometimes, that if I yelled for help my grandmother wouldn’t be able to hear me inside the house, but that was just the fear talking. I had a hand on the house, I wouldn’t get lost now.
Once we got round the corner to the back, some trick of the wind had blown the snow into a trough so that it wasn’t as deep. King and I could both move better those last few feet to the back door which led into the garage. I got the door open, and I stumbled inside. The moment the door closed behind me the silence of not being in the wind of the was so loud in my head. It was the first time I realized that silence is its own sound, or that the absence of noise is a sound all its own. I locked the door behind me and leaned on it. I said a prayer of gratitude that we were safe, then got King settled in his bed. I can’t remember if my grandmother came out and helped me pick the snow out of his fur and get him settled; I just remember standing in the warm house with the snow caked to my clothes trying to warm my hands by the heater. We didn’t have central heating, so I huddled by the warmth in the living room. I remember the pain as circulation returned to my fingers which were mottled in colors I’d never seen on my body before. My fingers still ache in the cold to this day as a reminder of how close we came that day.
