from John
On March 31st, 1997, I left work at 6PM and headed on to Route 84 from Storrs Road. It was snowing quite hard and I was in a hurry to get home but I was already questioning the route through Union. Twenty minutes up the highway I came upon a wall of semi-trucks crawling and sliding sideways blocking all traffic. Because of the crawl and slippery conditions drivers started to burn their clutches. I lost my clutch in the third lane next to the snowbank and could go nowhere, not that there was any place to go. About 30 feet up the road (with no cars in between) was a car in the first lane that was still trying to crawl behind a truck. I saw flaming clutch fluid dripping from the bottom of the car in the driving snow. Within a minute, the car was engulfed in flames, but the driver had narrowly escaped the flames running from his car. I couldn’t go anywhere along with the cars in the second and first lane on my right flank… and the wind was driving the flames and debris in our direction. That car burned to a crisp and then I sat in my car until 5 AM. Fortunately I could still run my motor to heat the car. Throughout the night I watched as towtrucks removed the cars with blown clutches one by one. At 5:30AM it was my turn and I ended up at Whitehouse’s Garage in Ashford. I finally made it to my home at about 9:30AM walking the last quarter mile through about two feet of snow. It was April Fools Day 1997.
One or two years later we had one of the coolest summers on record. I kept track of the high and low temperatures each day, and I did not record a day that was above 83 degrees. My corn was stunted that year. But the highest temperature that year was 89 degrees on March 31st. Go figure.
