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Foul weather driving means watching the skies and the traffic

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I suppose My Lovely Wife and I could have flown to Chicago to spend the holidays with her sister and our oldest daughter, but we were taking along our neurotic rescue dog, Archie. And unlike our daughter’s neurotic rescue dog — Merlin, an eight-pound mutt — the 80-pound Archie wasn’t going to fit under an airplane seat. It seemed easier to put the pooch in the back of the Kia and point the car west.

But a long drive isn’t something to take lightly, especially in the dead of winter. Long ago, when my father first handed me the keys to the family station wagon, he said, “A car is deadlier than a gun. Driving is the most dangerous thing you can do.”

I can’t say I’ve always treated cars with the respect they deserve — especially in my youth — but I knew that a 13-hour drive to Chicago (Evanston, actually) in a week when the weather folk were predicting a devastating bomb cyclone was going to be tricky.

My wife, Ruth, and I had planned to set out on the Thursday before Christmas, but we moved that forward a day when the forecast started looking especially apocalyptic. And we left open the possibility of cutting the drive in two, finding a hotel if the weather took a turn.

We didn’t want to succumb to “get-home-itis.” That’s what my father calls it when your good sense is overwhelmed by the desire to just get home.

Get-home-itis can cause people to make bad decisions. It happened in my dad’s line of work as an Air Force pilot. Pilots would die not in combat but on cross-country training flights when they didn’t want to lose precious time by going around a thunderstorm or by landing to refuel. They’d push it.

We didn’t push it. We left at 6 am — well, 6:05; I turned the car around at the end of the block to make sure I’d switched off the space heater in the bathroom (I had) — and were through the maddening tangle of Breezewood, Pa., in record time.

Ohio turns out to be much wider than it should be, but transiting it was fairly uneventful. So, too, with Indiana, home of the RV Hall of Fame. The worst traffic was on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive, where a great river of white headlights in one direction and red brake lights in the other was almost festive.

Once we were safely in Evanston, we hunkered down. The snow, when it came, wasn’t much, only about 3 inches. The cold was bitter, though, and so was the wind. It was 5-below when I walked Archie along Lake Michigan in the morning. I’d covered everything but my eyeballs and was certain I could feel my corneas turning to ice.

Not everyone had been able to get away early as we did. Two days before Christmas, four people were killed in a 46-vehicle pileup on an eastbound stretch of the Ohio Turnpike.

Driving is the most dangerous thing you can do.

We passed the remnants of the crash on our return drive on Dec. 27. Tow trucks were pulling jackknifed tractor-trailers out of the median. Other crews were dismantling smashed trailers, using big claws to shred the metal containers. One shattered trailer had spilled pallets of bottled water across the median.

This sobering aftermath reminded me of other dangerous drives I’d been on, in snowstorms and ice storms and rainstorms. When I was about 10, my family encountered a tremendous thunderstorm while driving back to San Antonio from Padre Island, Tex. My little brother and I were in the back seat, our parents in the front, my mother driving.

The storm had come on quickly, engulfing us in a torrent of rain and blurring everything around us. My mother and father exchanged tense words in that tone of voice parents reserve for each other. He wanted her to pull over, I think, but she wasn’t sure where the shoulder began. It was as if we were in a carwash, the world reduced to the interior of our Toyota. We were a little ship on a violent sea.

I can’t remember who started it, but soon we were all praying the rosary: ​​“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. … Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …”

It’s the only time I can remember our entire family praying together with such a specific purpose in mind.

I cannot say it was the prayers that did it, but we made it home.

This is the final week of our Helping Hand campaign, the reader fund drive in support of Bread for the City, Friendship Place and Miriam’s Kitchen.

To learn more about these three charities — and make a donation — please visit posthelpinghand.com.

John Kelly’s Washington

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