When my mother and my sisters and I left California after my parents' divorce, we found ourselves in the middle of a snowstorm in Nebraska. We stopped to buy chains for our blue Datsun 510 and then my mother got back on the freeway, hunched forward over the steering wheel, squinting into near white-out conditions. All three kids were in the back, she wouldn't let any of us ride in front. We were from California, this was a new and terrifying experience. We kids joined gloved hands in terror, offering Mom conflicting and unasked-for advice.

We'd gotten separated from my mother's brother and his girlfriend, who were driving a pickup truck with a U-Haul trailer attached, all our belongings. My uncle was something of a free spirit, in fact it was his idea to press ahead despite the weather and my mother's unfamiliarity with driving in such conditions.

Just as we began to emerge from a particularly difficult patch, my uncle's truck sped by us. I'll never forget it. The trailer had lost traction, and somehow had swung out to one side, it seemed to be traveling alongside the truck, parallel to it, seemingly impatient to get wherever we were going. Then I noticed that my uncle and his girlfriend were in the cab laughing their asses off, completely stoned. I wonder what ever happened to those two.