It is terribly off-putting to be driving down, say, Hamline Avenue, and suddenly find yourself sideways but still moving forward and then having the rear wheels catch a washboard ice ridge, throwing the vehicle completely in the other direction so that you are now traveling in the direction from which you came.

That this happened without my striking anything is proof of miracles, although I suppose if "miracle" is too theological, we could always call it serendipity.

The last time I went sideways was in the aftermath of the 1991 Halloween blizzard. I was eastbound on Grand Avenue and went sideways from about Avon to Dale. It would have been exhilarating if it wasn't so harrowing. It's like being in a sailboat with no keel and the jib and mainsail sheets having been let go by a frightened crew.

Now is as good a time as any to note the difference between floundering and foundering. "Floundering" is to proceed clumsily and in confusion. Check. "Foundering" is to become disabled, or, to stay nautical, to sink below the water as a result of having become disabled.

We are now floundering, the lot of us, spinning wheels on flat grade, not getting any purchase when the light turns green, crawling miserably when at last the wheels bite and take off. We are proceeding clumsily and in confusion.

Why? What has happened? With each passing year, it seems as though the snow gets the better of us. It is tempting to blame poor plowing, but the streets have been plowed. I guess it's too much snow falling on a still-warm Earth, so that by the time the plows get out there they are too late to recover pavement and thus the washboard ruts that have every fender-and-body man in town rubbing his hands in anticipation of a big Christmas payday.

And I wanted to be in the spirit. It was a lovely snow, almost identical to the big storm exactly two years ago practically to the day. It transformed the landscape and instantly made us a Christmas village, with crowns of snow on the streetlights and on the limbs of big pine trees, and the tiny lights buried now in the snow fought to be noticed in a subdued glow.

But then you have to drive in it, and all the goodwill in the world leaks out of you in about two blocks when you realize that the motorist two cars ahead didn't even bother to clean the snow off his windows, or hers -- so you have to be careful of that accident waiting to happen -- and that unless you somehow keep inching forward while also stopping, you have no chance to get going again.

There are those who manage to stay put. An emailer informed me that while he was watching the Green Bay-Detroit game Sunday night, a crawl on the bottom of the screen noted that something called Wolf Creek Online High School would be closed Monday because of the snow.

"What else is there to say about this?" Don wondered.

Nothing. There is nothing that might be said.

My normal 15-minute commute took 45 minutes Monday evening, and a fellow who sits next to me who normally has a 30-minute commute needed another complete hour to get in Tuesday, with traffic moving so slowly, or stopped altogether, that he was reading old essays that he scrounged up during a cleaning of his home office.

I'd like to get through it without cracking a headlight -- automobile manufacturers have certainly bollixed up headlights; they are no longer just a sealed beam, but an entire complicated unit -- or tearing off a bumper, but it's a crapshoot right now. We are certainly going to have get along with each other, that's for sure.
