Winter Rescue

"When the Prairie Winter Bites" by Ronald Douglas Frazier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Often it is in times of danger or duress when we find the best of ourselves in each other.

My wife Jade and I live live in a small rural town in Illinois called Chadwick. It is quite far from here to any major metropolitan area (the closest is Rockford, which is 60 miles away). Because of this, employment opportunities are limited. Fortunately, my wife has a good job in Sterling, Illinois.

Recently, we were told of a major snowstorm coming our direction, and that we should either be careful or maybe stay at home for the day. My wife, who cares for people with Down's syndrome, did not want to leave her patients when they needed her the most. This I understood, and I vowed I would try to get her to work where possible. We left the house as the snowstorm started to worsen on Dec. 23. 

At first, the roads seemed okay. It was not anything I had not driven through before in previous winters. However, as we turned a bend on the highway a giant gust of wind blew so much snow that visibility was instantly zero. Suddenly I hit a five-foot snow drift on the highway.

Miraculously the minivan was not damaged. I was able to back out of the pile of snow only to run into another five-foot snow drift in the back. Just as miraculously, I managed to get out of it, but then I hit an ice sheet and slid into a ditch. The minivan was stuck fast, and slightly tilted on its side. Tried as I might, there was no way to get out of this. Worse yet, the temperature outside had dropped to -3 degrees F, and the wind was probably making it 10 to 15 degrees colder than that. 

I immediately called 911 and explained our situation. They told me there were about 20 other vehicles stuck on the road, and I would have to wait. We had enough gas, but the heating system in the minivan was barely working against that kind of cold.

Almost an hour later an all-terrain police truck came to us. The police officer first pulled my wife out of the minivan through the passenger front door; the doors on the driver's side were all in the snow and could not be accessed, and the passenger sliding side door was frozen shut, so the passenger front door was the only way out. He put her into the truck to keep her warm and then came back for me and was able to get me out.

He told me there was nothing he could do about the minivan at the time, and that I might have to wait until the next day for the municipal government to try and pull it out of the ditch. He was able to take us home which was only five miles away. Even with an all terrain truck, the police officer found it slow going.

I managed to call a car repair service I know, and they got my minivan pulled out of the ditch three or four hours later. Despite what the minivan had been put through, it was undamaged. I drove it a little through town to make sure it was all right, and it was fine.

My wife called her employer and explained what had happened. Her employer was able to get someone to substitute for her shift that day, and Jade said she would go back to work the next day. The next day, I drove Jade to and from work without incident.

Living in this part of Illinois means that extreme weather can put your life in peril. All of the people who live here understand this, and we all know that the Illinois prairie is as unforgiving as it is beautiful. The police here do a marvelous job of trying to safeguard and protect any and all residents. Even if someone goes missing for a few hours, the police will actively look for them. And a neighbor here is just as equally an asset in life and death situations as the police.

Back in 2006, in a similar situation, Jade and I were returning from my wife's Bible study when we got a flat tire. I managed to coax the car back to the edge of Chadwick, and we walked in 10 degrees F weather with snow falling to get to one of our neighbor's homes. We got there, and they provided us with tea so we could warm up. 

Not long after that, our neighbor's husband took me back to our stranded car and he fixed the tire. Even though it was freezing, he had dressed for the weather and was able to fix the flat in 15 to 20 minutes. He did not charge for it. I was then able to get the car back to our home.

In the 20 years that I have lived here, I’ve learned that no matter what your neighbor may think of you, if you are in distress, they will go out of their way to help you. I have seen neighbors who cannot stand each other perform heroic acts to save someone they do not like because they still care about human life.

We all realize that we are in the same harsh and unforgiving environment, and death can come in very nasty forms — everything from being attacked by wolves or coyotes or even bobcats to freezing to death in one's own car on an abandoned road. People out here have seen this sometimes happen to their nearest and dearest, and they do not wish it on anyone. In the end, we have learned to trust in our neighbor as well as our local police to keep us safe.

In this, it is a true community.

Daniel Nardini spent 22 years as a newspaper correspondent for Lawndale News and The Fulton Journal. He has published six books, including his eyewitness account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, The Day China Cried. He is listed as an Illinois author in the Illinois Center for the Book.

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