Driving on Hwy 29 east after a meeting in Minneapolis, I had the unusual situation of having three other fellows in the car with me for the trip. Normally I traveled alone. This had been an unusual meeting, as the whole Midwest staff was summoned to Minneapolis for a meeting where they announced not only the merger of two former competitors’ feed divisions, but also shared that about 700 people were being let go in the process. Some were being offered the opportunity to interview for positions in the new organization, and I ended up being rehired later into a different territory, but that’s a different story. The drive home was a pretty somber one for all of us, and it was accentuated by the heavy snow coming down and blowing. I did not have an AWD vehicle, just a standard Chevy sedan, wrangling snow building up on the two-lane highway. Every vehicle that went by in the oncoming lane left you awash in blowing snow and made seeing and driving very treacherous, leaving you in a whiteout for a few seconds. Semis could be seen in the front, but the back parts of each vehicle were invisible.
Explosion of glass
Hidden in the backwash of one, a jacked up pickup or utility-type truck was following way too close for good visibility of their own, but maybe being up pretty high helped them. I cleared the semi OK, but suddenly in the swirling snow behind it I saw the bumper and front tire of another vehicle, way too close to my front quarter-panel, and as it went by, the second truck clipped my mirror. That sedan had a mirror that was integral to the window, and the force of the mirror being hit exploded my driver’s side window into thousands of tiny glass cubes, leaving me with glass peppered into my face and hands, my lap full of small glass pieces, and everyone in the car with glass in their laps.
The truck kept going, and I was able to keep my car under control somehow and pull over after a bit. Traffic was steady in both directions, and the snowdrifts prevented me from immediately heading for the shoulder. When we were finally able to stop, I slowly swung out of my seat and shook the glass bits out of my clothes, and we wondered how we were going to complete four more hours driving with a blown-out window in a snowstorm. I dug in the trunk and took a corduroy sportcoat out of my suitcase, positioned it inside the broken window, and slammed the door to cover the opening. After picking the bigger glass bits out of my face in the mirror, we took off for the rest of the drive east. I think all four of us were thinking that if the truck had been even two inches further into our lane, we would have been in much worse shape. I never even wanted to think how much worse it easily could have been; I just accepted that we either got lucky or were blessed.
Someone was watching out for me that day.