All broken-hearted,
I’m in a brand new car,
But can’t get started.
This little rhyme didn’t say it all. I was also seriously frightened and freezing my tail off. Vicky Lynn Wright is my name. I was, the proverbial, “Damsel in Distress.” Let me tell you how I came to be in that situation.
My first mistake was not listening to my husband and following his advice. I am guilty of that quite often, but as it seems, I never learn. It is said that opposites attract. That is certainly true for my husband, Eric, and me. While we do have some traits in common, we don’t think the same way at all. He makes flawlessly logical decisions and mine are always tainted with emotion. He does what is right and I do what feels right. Those two things are rarely the same.
He says that’s one of the things that he loves about me, but he has spanked me for not following his lead on occasion. He will probably give me a spanking over this if he ever gets his hands on me again. He would never really hurt me. In fact, I love his spankings. They turn me on. They always lead to great sex and then he holds me and loves me. He had spanked me several times before I married him, but only when I deserved it. I knew what I was getting into.
I was sitting in his new Chevy Tahoe. It was only about three weeks old. I had slid off a secondary two-lane highway. I nosed into a snow-filled ditch at an angle and there was no way I was going to get out on my own. New snow was coming down hard and there were several inches already on the ground.
The wind and poor visibility caused me to lose control. It must have been blowing at thirty-five miles per hour and gusting much higher. I didn’t have snow tires or chains. The car was new and had never been set up for weather like this. The recent weather had been so nice that we thought winter was over. My outside temperature gauge said seventeen degrees Fahrenheit and it had dropped five degrees since I slipped into the ditch about an hour earlier. Winter wasn’t over.
I was in the middle of a full-blown blizzard. The storm was predicted, but I thought I could make it to my destination before the worst of it hit. It appeared that I was about twenty miles short and I was immobile. Twenty miles was too far to walk. It would be impossible for me in this weather. Eric had been right. He had told me to leave home a day earlier than planned or to put my trip off for a week or two. I was sure to get a spanking.
Look it up. The date was March 13, 2021. That storm turned out to be one of the worst ever to hit Denver this late in the year. It dumped twenty-seven inches of snow on Denver. I was close to a hundred miles northwest of there and almost a thousand feet higher.
When I wrecked out, I had let the car’s engine continue to run after everything stopped moving. I felt like I needed to run the heater to stay warm. I tried to call Eric, but I was in a dead zone. There was no cell service.
The car’s engine overheated quickly. I figured that I had damaged the radiator and lost my coolant. I shut the engine off. The car didn’t retain heat for very long, after that. I was scared.
On the good side of the slate, I hadn’t been injured. I had been driving at about fifteen miles per hour. I was probably going less than five when I hit the ditch. The airbags weren’t activated so there hadn’t been a sudden impact. I had slid sideways. The car had come to rest aligned with the bottom of the ditch and on almost level ground. I was a bit nose high.
I had food, water, and warm wool blankets in the car. I also had warm clothing including insulated boots, gloves, and coveralls that were made of the new high-tech fabrics. I was already wearing my long johns under my street clothes and the car would keep me dry as well as out of the wind. I had a good parka lying in the seat beside me. I squirmed into the parka right then.
I had heard a weather report that had predicted temperatures in the low twenties. That had been a forecast for Denver. There was no telling how cold it would get, at this altitude.
I hadn’t considered that I could die from the cold, but I could see myself being very uncomfortable for the near future. The storm should pass in the next twelve to fifteen hours. I reasoned that all the available snowplows and other snow removal equipment would go to work on the interstate highways first. I was on what amounted to a back road. With no way to communicate, I wasn’t likely to get any help for at least three days unless someone just happened by. It could be longer.
Another hour passed. I still had hope that someone might pass by and rescue me. It was late in the day and the light began to fade. Visibility was so poor that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference except psychologically. Dark and cold would be worse than just cold. I decided that I should prepare to spend the night while I could still see.
The car was loaded with things I could use to keep myself well fed, hydrated, and warm. I was very lucky in that respect. That wasn’t by chance. The purpose of the trip had partially been to move a load of supplies to my parent’s log cabin in the woods.
My mother and father are in their middle and late fifties respectively. They are what we in the mountains refer to as, “Snowbirds.” My dad had done well in business. He cashed out and retired on his fiftieth birthday. Mother was forty-six, I think. They bought, “Mountain Home,” as they call it, the next year. The cabin is small but very nice with all the modern accoutrements. It is on about twenty acres of relatively flat land in a mountain valley at just a bit under six thousand feet in elevation. It is a beautiful place.
They spend their winters in rented property in either Florida or California each year. The rest of the time, they live here. They love the mountains and they like to be near my family and me. My husband, Eric, and I have been married for seven years. I am thirty-two and Eric is a year older. We have a four-year-old son, Clark, and a daughter, Kate, who is a bit over a year younger. We live year-round in Aurora, which is a smaller satellite city of Denver. We can’t be snowbirds. We have to make a living.
I crawled around in the car and inventoried my possessions. I knew what was in the boxes and duffle bags because I had packed them all. I ran across Eric’s emergency pack and the sleeping bag that he always carried. “That sleeping bag could be a lifesaver,” I thought. Eric told me when he bought it that it was rated to thirty degrees below zero. He said that it would keep you alive at that temperature, but it would keep you comfortable at zero degrees. Things were looking up.
I also found a box of twenty-four tea candles in his pack. These small candles were intended to be used in a backpacker’s stove. The stove was there too, as was a box of waterproof matches. I did the math. I could use six of them a day if they had to last four days. There was no way I would need that many. Each one would burn for two hours or more. I could have hot food. Among a variety of other things, I knew I had a whole case of mixed Campbell’s soups. They would be easy to heat right in the cans they came in and all I had to do to open them was pull the tab. Eric’s pack also had a dozen military ration packs. I think he called them MREs. I had eaten one once. I think I had rather have the soup. All things considered though, things continued to look up.