From the depths of Kansas’ frigid blizzard, helpful hands reach out to help us through | Opinion

My car had pulled halfway out into the snowy road, around 10 at night, when it stopped moving. Slushy snow had ensnared the back wheels.

I tried shifting into drive and heading back into the driveway, but it caught on another batch of snow and ice. For a few moments, I switched between drive and reverse, feeling the car roll forward and backward but making no headway.

“This is what you get,” I told myself, “for forgetting all those New Hampshire lessons.”

While I grew up in Kansas and went to school here, I spent more than a decade in the Granite State, a span that encapsulated the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and two terms of Barack Obama. My husband and I got married and adopted our son there. We enjoyed our time in the Northeast, but we gritted our teeth through the region’s notoriously blustery winters.

We had figured out how to shovel, how to extract vehicles of various sizes from driveways. We had paid men to shovel snow off the flat part of our home’s roof so it wouldn’t collapse.

Moving back to Kansas put all of that experience in the rearview mirror, so to speak. While we missed our friends from the area, we most certainly did not miss the blizzards arriving every couple of weeks from October through March. (If you think that’s an exaggeration, you haven’t lived in New Hampshire.) We had closed the door on snow.

Or so I thought until Monday evening when I found myself immobile, halfway blocking the road.

I raced back inside the house, summoning both spouse and child, who proceeded to poke fun at me and ineffectually shovel around the car.

An SUV pulled over, and its driver came out to help. He and I pushed from the back of the car, then the front. We turned the steering wheel all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. All of us took turns digging around the tires.

Finally, the driver departed, apologizing abundantly. Remembering one of his suggestions, I found some cat litter inside and sprinkled it around the tires.

Voila! The car moved, and I was able to pull out of the street. Thankfully, traffic was beyond light or I might have caused a pileup to remember.

Yet I found myself thinking about that man the rest of the evening and into Tuesday. I found myself thinking about our neighbor, who had generously loaned us a snow shovel after my husband helped shovel out her driveway. I thought about the way in which a severe weather event like a blizzard really counts as a severe life event, one in which we all face the same obstacles.

What happens when it snows and people can’t get out of their driveways? Other people help them. That’s what.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” wrote English poet John Donne in 1624. “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were.”

No one asked what our political beliefs were, who we voted for, who made up our family. No, folks simply helped. Those two brief instances in my life were no doubt reflected hundreds if not thousands of times across Kansas this long weekend. People rolled up their sleeves and shoveled and pushed and got one another out of sticky situations that were probably their own damn fault.

I should have known better. I should have had a shovel. I should have used it more thoroughly before trying to pull out of the driveway. I should have done all those things. Yet others helped me through my own shortcomings and ignorance.

That’s a pretty swell lesson for a snow day.