Hot Rod Homecoming

Pretty much every American has seen The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, the 1971 film that inspired the acclaimed television series, The Waltons.

Well, I’ve got a homecoming story too.

I wish I could remember the exact year it was. It was either in the late seventies or early eighties–perhaps some weather-buff reading this might know. The entire Willamette Valley had come under the grip of a brutal arctic front, and I was heading north from California on the way home for Christmas. Destination: Silverton, Oregon.

At the time I was attending Chabot Community College in Hayward to make up some courses I’d flaked out on in high school, in preparation for enrollment at Cal State University-Hayward. I’d tanked up my 1970 Camaro and was looking forward to my mother’s traditional turkey dinner with all the fixings.

Everything was fine through the Mount Shasta region and over the Siskiyou Pass. Some light snow had fallen during the afternoon, and immediately turned to slush under my wheels. But as I took the long grades down out of the Siskiyou Range and passed Roseburg, night fell, and an icy fog descended. Around Cottage Grove, with Eugene still twenty miles away, I realized that the surface of Interstate 5 had become a skating rink.

I had the worst kind of tires imaginable for such a driving surface, super-wide BF Goodrich street racing tires. Tire chains? Nope. It wasn’t long before I figured out that any kind of braking action was not an option. With rear-wheel drive, the slightest touch on the brake pedal immediately sent the Camaro into a vertiginous fish-tail swerve. The fog grew heavier; in my headlights I could only see about four or five white highway lines ahead. All else was a black abyss.

Any hope that the grip of winter would loosen as I traveled north was dashed as I crept past Eugene at 30 miles per hour. I would later learn that the weather event was a freakish ice-cold front, down from Canada. Things got worse, not better. I began to see vehicles off the highway, a lot of them, askew in roadside ditches, their windows obscured by heavy frost. The front had caught a lot of Oregonians unawares. This was in the time before cell phones, and I wondered if there were people in some of those cars. But I kept driving, knowing that if I stopped, I might never gain enough traction to continue. What was typically a seven-hour drive from the Bay Area to Mom and Pop’s house had become an exhausting eleven-hour slog with many miles to go.

I’d gassed up in Medford, but my Chevy was powered by a souped-up GM 350 engine, and fuel was beginning to become a concern. I’d made the drive many times, and knew that a fourth fill-up at one of the Salem exits was necessary to make Silverton. But from the standpoint of fuel economy, the greatly reduced speed the arctic temperatures had forced on me was actually a silver lining.

When I reached the Enchanted Forest Theme Park near Turner, whose parking lot lights were barely visible in the encompassing fog, I saw a welcome sight ahead: two Marion County sheriff’s department cruisers parked with roof lights blazing. While the presence of first-responders was comforting, when I passed by where two deputies stood looking down from the highway shoulder, I saw that some unlucky motorist had plunged down the hillside at the long curve that runs past the theme park.

With my back cramped and my head aching, I finally saw my exit—Lancaster Drive–loom in the near-distance. I took the ramp carefully, running on empty, and pulled into the gas station closest to my position in the intersection. I must have been overanxious, or feeling an elated sense of relief, because that’s where I lost control of the vehicle. When I attempted to accelerate up to the pumps, my big tires spun, the Camaro spun, and I slipped down the icy asphalt. Only a jarring impact against the curb kept me from sliding out into the intersection where several vehicles were creeping along.

The Camaro was not going anywhere without help. I asked the station attendant if I could use the phone, and phoned home.

“Don’t even try it,” my father said, warning me about getting back behind the wheel and attempting to reach his pine forest home on NE Abiqua Road, at the threshold of the Cascade Range foothills. “It is absolutely treacherous out here, and that hot rod you’re driving will never make it.”

It turned out that my sister and her husband had already arrived for the holiday, and he, a true, prepared Oregonian, was driving a vintage, three-quarter-ton 1973 International Travelall. “We’re coming to get you.”

Long story short, the station attendants helped me push the Camaro to a safe parking spot for the night. I grabbed a lousy cup of coffee from a vending machine, and about an hour later my father and brother-in-law rolled up.

On the long, slow drive out to Pop’s place, surveying the frozen winter-scape, I realized that the Camaro would never had made it, and that the fate I managed to avoid on the interstate might well have befallen me.

My mother’s welcoming hug never felt so good as it did that night.