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While Oklahoma does enjoy bright golden hazes on the meadows, it also gets some supremely nasty weather. On one particular February afternoon in 1987, it was raining a freezing sleet, piling up on the sidewalks, the parking lot and the cars outside Broken Arrow High School, where I was a senior.
We all tiptoed towards our cars after class, laughing, slipping, and stabilizing ourselves as best we could on whatever was solid and nearby. I made it to my car—well, my mom’s car, a 1982 silver Volkswagen Jetta—-without major injuries, which felt like an accomplishment.
I scraped the three-inch thick layer of ice off the windshield and started the slow crawl of a drive back home along side streets. I immediately cranked up the defrost to melt the sleet, forgetting that the heat exchanger on the Jetta had gone out months before. Woops. No heat=no defrost.
Without the defrost, the sleet was piling up on the windshield again, and after driving for about five minutes, I couldn’t see anything. I pulled over to re-scrape the windshield three times, then thought, “This is ridiculous” and found a convenience store to use a pay phone to call my mom.
“Mom, this is insane. It’s been an hour, and I’m only two miles from school. It’s so dangerous out here. You have to come get me.”
“Cason, you have the only car. I can’t come get you. You’re going to have to figure it out.”
WTH?? What am I going to do? I can’t drive because I can’t SEE. This is impossible. I have to get home, but there’s no way to GET home. How am I going to do this?
The only way I can see to drive is if I scrape the windshield. What if I roll the window down and scrape the windshield as I’m driving? I’d have to drive slowly, but I’d have to anyway so no loss there. Well, that might work.
I drove like that, my left arm out of the window, scraping the windshield as I drove, for the three hours it took me to drive the 21 miles to get back to our house. I was a human popsicle by that point and stood over the heat register for an hour until I thawed out. But, I made it.
Until that moment, talking on the pay phone with my mom, I had been a boy who relied on others to handle the tough situations of my life for me. In that moment, and on that drive home, I became responsible for my life. I became resourceful, I persevered, and I survived. I did it on my own.
On this day, I became a man.
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Photo by Alvin Engler on Unsplash
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