Road bullies

I hate semi's. No offense to any of you who have family members who drive truck or may yourself. I'm sure you are courteous of others and it's gotta be a very consuming job. But I hate semi's.

I hate semi's in Wisconsin even worse. These kings of the road all too often put innocent people in danger with their "i'm bigger, move out of my way" attitude.

Today....... someone upstairs decided it was not the day for my son and I to die. Today I am blessed to be able to write this. An angel on the road saved our lives, literally.

We are in the midst of a big snowstorm. When I left to take Chris to the doctor it was raining a little, I knew the snow was coming but had hoped to be home before it got to icky. Unfortunately that didn't happen and as we walked into the clinic it was coming down like crazy.

We finishe the appt (went great if you were wondering) and started home, by now the roads were a mess of nasty slush. If you live in the great white north you know that sometimes that freezing slush is worse to drive in than a few inches of nice white fluff, you catch it wrong and it pushes your car this way and that and if you are behind someone you can't see past your windshield and hope for the best until the gap between you and the other car widens.

I get on the highway and fall into place with a line of cars, going about 40-50 mph depending on how clear the particular stretch we were on was. Again, if you live in the great white north you know what I am talking about. There is kind of this rolling caravan respect and you stick together, aside from the wayward speed hog who chances it and flies past everyone. Usually these are the idiots in trucks who think that 4 wheel drive makes them godlike. They are also usually the people you see a few miles up the road in the ditch and you drive past yelling "got there fast, didn't ya?!"

Anyway. So I'm about 4th in line in the little caravan and at the top of a small hill I see a semi on the side of the road with his flashers on. Up around here, we don't refer to these as "hazard lights" but rather "4-ways", just a little northern redneck trivia for ya. So like the good conciencous (murdered that word) drivers we are, our caravan slowly merges into the left lane. All except the white Cadillac in front of me who apparently decides the left lane looks rather nasty and she'd rather stay in the right lane and risk running down the truck driver who is changing his tire, or whatever it is they do when they sit on the side of the road like that.

So when it's my time to change lanes I make check my mirrors and blind spot and there is no one behind me on either side for quite a while. I make the merge and soon find myself passing the cadillac who has slowed down in the right lane. I get beside her and glance in my rearview and see.......

A very large grill in my back window. OH.... MY.... GOD. And it's getting closer, and closer and omg it's almost touching my bumper.

I'm stuck. I'm soo stuck. I have a black camry in front of me, a white cadillac beside me. I can't speed up, I can't change lanes, I can't slow down and this truck is literally trying to run me off the road. I speed up as everyone in front of me moves over to the right lane and my car starts the familiar "slush slide" and I realize I have to make a choice RIGHT NOW.

I can gun it and slide and hit whatever in an uncontrolled fashion. I can hit my brakes and get run over by the semi (mind you, I am not in my Suburban, I am in my tiny Saturn L200), or I can run the Cadillac off the road with a quick lane change into him.

The semi by this point is literally a couple inches from my bumper and we are about to go downhill. My eyes tear up and I whisper "I'm sorry Christian" as I grip the wheel about to try to drive controlled into the median at 45 mph. This is my only option. It won't hurt anyone else and the median looks fairly smoothe (hard to tell for sure with the snow).

Just as I'm about to glide the wheel gently to the left the angel in the white cadillac sees what's going on and in one smoothe motion she slams on her brakes and I instead jerk the wheel into the right lane. The semi doesn't look back as he screams past us both.

3 of us pull off the next ramp and the lady in the Cadillac is obviousely shaken. She walks over to my car and sees Christian sleeping in the back seat and says "OMG, and you had a child in the car too!" I thank her for quite literally saving our lives and we all go about our day.

Unfortunately I didn't get to report the semi. Calling the police or writing down his plate number would have put us in more danger and I wasn't about to do that.

So, I'm thanking my lucky stars right now. I never again want to be in that moment where I am making a choice that could kill myself and my child. I honestly had no way of knowing what was under the snow in that median, would we have rolled? very likely. BLAH!

Scary stuff.