It was around five o’clock in the evening when the winds struck. Till then the air had been quiet, the darkening trees speeding past us, a relief against the dreary greyness of late fall. We’d another forty-five minutes before reaching home, and Dad was fiddling with the radio, trying to get a song. I hated the old country stuff he listened to, but it was easier to protest in the crowded kitchen of home with Mother, the baby, and the boys buffering us, than in the close confines of the truck. I was always shy whenever I was alone with him. Fished out of the family corpus, he looked minuscule, yet felt as immense as God. And I, without the structure of family shoring me up, as crippled as Job upon discovering himself bereft of the lap he believed cradled him.

“Watch out, Lovey!” Dad yelled, seeing the patch of ice before we were skidding on it. Within minutes we were caught in a maelstrom of swirling eastern winds and snow. Dad reduced speed to a crawl. Vision immediately vanished as slob snow smothered the windshield. The wipers creaked into being, scarcely scraping an opening through the thickening paste.

I felt a bit scared. We were still a long ways from home—thirteen miles between the highway to Deer Lake and the northwest shores of Newfoundland where we lived. And, given how I was only eleven, the few times I had driven this road was when mother or the boys couldn’t make it and Dad needed somebody to talk for him. Lord, he hated the way townies frowned at his thick brogue.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Almost home, too.” A pair of headlights flashed before us and he muttered again as he touched the brakes and our truck swerved on the muddied dirt road, more slippery than ice.

“Testy bastards,” he swore at the brakes, slowing to a near stop. The headlights passed, and he gently accelerated, swearing, “Goddamn the like-a-this, Goddamn the like-a-this,” in the loud irritated tone he always used whenever he was facing something that fought back, whether it was a faulty chainsaw, a stuck screw, or Mother.

A squall struck us broadside, and I bit back a cry of fright as we near fish-tailed over an embankment. Dad kept going. Clinging nervously to the door-handle, I leaned forward, straining to see through the white rain slamming against us. Two feet. Couldn’t see more than two feet. Dad switched the lights to high beam, then back down again, hunching forward as I was, his nose an inch from the windshield. Suddenly, the wipers stopped. Just stopped.

“Hey!?” and all other words left us as we both stared at the immediately blanketed windshield, the headlights dulling.

“Jesus, put down your window, Lovey, put down your window!” Dad roared, pumping the brakes. “Where’s the road, where’s the edge of the road?

“Quickly screwing down the window, I shoved my head outside and was instantly struck by a fist of wind and slob snow.

“You see it? See it?”