Leaving Las Vegas in The Snow

What happens on the way home from Vegas

My partner, Andy, and I gasped as snowflakes coated our car as we headed out of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas isn’t where you go for snow. Isn’t the cocaine variety of snow the kind of snow you find there, not the crystalline water-ice that falls silently from the clouds?

You can thank Wikipedia for that Stevie Nicks-sounding definition of snow, not the cocaine reference.

I’ve lived in California all my life, so rain, hail, and wind are the only non-sunny weather conditions I’m an expert in. Whatever’s hitting our car is harder than rain but softer than hail — therefore, by deductive reasoning, it must be snow.

We had no idea it would snow. The weather report said clear skies with a slight possibility of rain.

If there’d been any indication of snow, Andy would have been prepared. He grew up in Alberta, Canada, and everyone there knows snow.

Snow was the last thing we expected to happen.

If we’d spent all our cash so stopping for lunch was out of the question, we wouldn’t have been surprised. But snow as we tried to put our lost weekend behind us?

Snow was something we’d never have imagined.

Isn’t snow falling in Las Vegas tantamount to hell freezing over?

Perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way, and unexpected snowfall on the way out of Vegas is lucky. I could have used my last dollar to buy a lottery ticket.

Most of my snow knowledge comes from watching movies like “Fargo,” “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” and “Frozen.” And unlike Julia Ormond in “Smila’s Sense of Snow,” I have no sense of snow — I’m snow senseless.

It’s difficult for me to empathize when people talk about shoveling snow, waiting on the snowplows, or needing chains for driving. I have never walked in someone else’s snowshoes, feared black ice, or had to make sure the pipes didn’t burst.

I’m supposed to long for a white Christmas, but why?

When I hear snow stories, they remind me of friends’ tales about their hilariously inappropriate drunk uncle. No one can wait for him to visit, but when he does, they can’t wait for him to leave.

Drunk Uncle Albert always overstays his welcome and damages a few family heirlooms in the process. Like snow, he looks good until he starts to melt, then he becomes a dirty slush-lush stinking of dried vomit and stale dreams.

They say that it never rains in California, but that’s a lie. The truth is it rarely rains in Southern California, giving people enough time to forget what they’re supposed to do when it does.

I was raised in San Jose, in Northern California, and it rained all the time, but it never snowed. This was the reason that I, and probably every other San Jose citizen, was stunned and delighted at the softly falling flakes outside our windows that morning decades before I’d be in a leaving Las Vegas snowstorm.

It was Feb. 5, around 6:00 a.m., when it started to snow. I was 15, and the closest I’d ever been to snow was when our neighbors brought a cooler full of snow back from their vacation.

I ran outside barefoot, dressed in cotton pajamas, and almost slipped on the snow-covered front steps. I lifted my head towards the sky, opened my mouth, and tried to catch a snowflake on my tongue as I’d seen them do on “ A Charlie Brown Christmas.” For a second, I tasted the cold nothingness before it melted.

Neighbors were coming out of their houses, pointing to the sky. “It’s snowing,” we said to each other, not caring we were stating the obvious. We continued to look up as if aliens were dropping from the sky.

There wasn’t much snow, as it fell for less than an hour. We couldn’t make snow angels, have snowball fights, or build snowmen with old carrots and charcoal briquettes for eyes.

We didn’t get to know snow that day with our all too brief visit, but you can ask anyone alive back then about that snow hour, and they’ll remember.

“These guys are idiots,” Andy says. “Do they think they’re helping the situation?” He’s referring to the driver behind us whose car is so close to our bumper that we’re practically one vehicle.

I roll down my window and stick my hand out, feeling the chill. There must be others in our slow-moving line of cars which have never lived with snow because the more it snows, the more our fellow travelers start to freak out. If they can’t handle rain, there’s no way they can manage a spontaneous snowstorm.

Drivers and passengers are honking, shouting, and getting more agitated by the minute. No one has chains or snow tires, and they don’t know what to do.

We’re crawling along the highway.

A Highway patrol car drives up on the shoulder of the road, trying to be both a calming presence and an escort.

Ironically, the day Andy and I met was when I developed a phobia of driving on the freeway. I can be a passenger, but there are times when I get so nervous that I have to squeeze the handgrip and shut my eyes.

I’m grateful that my phobia prevented me from being behind the wheel this trip. I wouldn’t have known what to do.

Andy keeps his head and drives slowly on the snow-dusted highway. He knows what he’s doing, but it doesn’t help my slowly increasing fear.

Nothing looks like it usually does on this journey: the cacti are frosted in snow, the sky is a milky grey, and it feels like we’re driving into snowy oblivion.

The harder it snows and the faster my heartbeats, with a light sweat covering my body. My neck is hot — a sign I need to calm down.

I look through the windshield at the snowy world outside, blocking- out the other cars and their passengers. I focus on the strange beauty of the snowy desert.

The Highway Patrol detours us further into the mountains, which doesn’t make sense. Won’t it be harder to navigate the car at a higher elevation?

We’re only in the mountains for a few miles, to my relief.

Our Las Vegas to Los Angeles journey, which takes four and half hours on a good day, took over seven hours.

It may not have felt like it as we crept along in the snow, but we were lucky. If we’d left any later, the roads would have been closed; we’d have been forced to stay in Las Vegas until the storm had passed.

Although there were drivers out there who weren’t in good spirits after losing at the tables, were hungover, and lost their final sense of cool at dealing with the delays due to the snow, we didn’t get into an accident and made it home safely.

Lady Luck hadn’t been with us at the slots, but she was a passenger with us on our trip home through the snow.