So. You’ve survived yet another blizzard without skidding off the road and into a ravine. Not a single time all winter have you been forced to dine on one of your own extremities in order to stay alive in your buried car.

Congratulations, champ. Just don’t go busting your arm patting yourself on the back, because I’m here to tell you: It ain’t you — it’s your car.

Mostly your car, anyway. Because if you bought it any time after 1990 or so, it probably has all-wheel drive, automatic traction control and tires with actual treads on them rather than just smooth patches of rubber with a few metal wires sticking out of them.

What am I ranting about, you ask? I get that a lot.

Mostly I’ve just been thinking about how cars used to be compared to how they are today. There was a time, you know, when roughly 95 percent of the cars on the road had rear-wheel drive only and they were absolutely atrocious in the snow.

While it’s true that rear-wheel cars were awesome for doing cookies (or doughnuts if you want to be difficult) in an empty mall parking lot, it also meant that if you were a bad driver, you weren’t going to stay on the road for long. Rear-wheel drive cars were not forgiving about that snow action. At best, you’d end up stuck in a snowbank at the side of the road and you’d have to fork over serious paper route money to get someone to pull you out of it.

At worst, you’d end up at the bottom of a ravine, where you’d be forced to eat your own fingers while waiting for spring to arrive. It happened to a guy I know.

Back in the day, even routine snowstorms would see cars littering the sides of roads from one end of town to the other. This happened without variation. The day would be filled with the delightful sounds of rubber spinning on ice, swear words and the grunts and groans of men and women engaged in trying to push the disabled car out of the snow.

“Rock her, Martha!” some know-it-all would invariably yell, even if his wife’s name wasn’t Martha. “Back and forth! Back and forth!”

Every one knew that the only way to get a stuck car unstuck was to rock her, Martha. Back and forth, back and forth, until you’d rocked her for so long that the tires had spun grooves 3 feet deep in the ice and the front of the car was now pointing at the sky like the nose of a sunken ship.

Sometimes the car would come unstuck; sometimes it would not. It really had nothing to do with how many floor mats you wedged under the tires, or how much kitty litter you sprinkled behind them. It was all a matter of how Mother Nature was feeling that day and whether you’d done something to piss her off.

Of course, the best way to keep yourself out of the snowbanks in the first place was to have a piece-of-crap car that wouldn’t start in temperatures that dipped below 40 degrees. Like, ever.

Back in those days, your battery would never just outright die in the cold. No, it would team up with your carburetor to provide just enough signs of life to give you hope that the car might start if you employed just the right mix of swearing and praying.

And pumping the gas, Martha. The key to starting any frozen, groaning car was to pump the gas in just the right way. Not too fast, not too slow, but juuuust … OK, get out of the car, Martha. You’re doing it all wrong.

Everybody back then thought he was the Kung Fu master of pumping the gas in cold weather, as though the art of repeatedly depressing and then releasing the gas pedal was one that could only be learned through years of study in the hidden hills of Tibet. If your car didn’t start in the cold, it’s because you weren’t pumping the gas right. Period!

I don’t know if it was the advent of fuel-injection, better batteries or what, but you hardly ever see groaning, near-dead car syndrome anymore. These days, your car either starts, or it doesn’t. There’s no need for any of that frantic key-twisting, gas-pumping, steering-wheel-pounding madness that marked so many freezing cold mornings back in the day. Hell, the newer cars don’t even have keys, so there’s really no need to yell at Martha.

Although it’s probably her fault.

Back in those wintry days, the only people who could move about normally during big snowstorms were the guys with pickup trucks. You’d be crawling along at 8 mph down Main Street and some dude in a Ford F-150 would go blasting by you at 45, laughing as he went. You’d grip your steering wheel even tighter, grit your teeth and swear that next winter, you were going to get yourself a pickup truck with that fancy 4-wheel drive.

As it turns out, you didn’t have to. These days, even the small, weenie-looking cars have all-wheel drive, and chances are good that the driver blasting by you on outer Sabattus Street is going to be driving a Prius instead of an F-150.

These are weird times, my friend. Maybe you should just call a cab.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. If he’s spinning his wheels, it’s not him. It’s Martha. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com. 

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