The Snow Line

They say that the first million is the hardest.  For us, buying a house was the threshold that was the most difficult to cross.

Early in our marriage, we moved to San Francisco for my husband’s residency.  Through a college friend, we made arrangements to take over another friend’s rental home as he was leaving to clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  Happily, we were spared the trouble of house-hunting in the Bay Area entirely; moving cross country the day after graduation was enough for us to handle. 

During those years, before our careers began to take off, we were collateral damage to Ronald Reagan, a popular President whose famous tax cuts and subsequent reversals hit us coming and going.  I had been in the middle of my graduate degree when the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 caused me to lose most of the Public Health Traineeship that was funding my tuition; my husband was similarly hit.  Together, we max’d out every available student loan product, each with increasingly higher interest rates and correspondingly shorter grace periods.  We exhausted all subsidized sources and resorted to punishing bank loans with floating retail rates to complete our degrees. In the end, we amassed a staggering amount of debt ranging from 3% with deferred interest and payback to as high as 23% with no deferral of interest, even while still in school.  Our “pay it backward” strategy was to get educated first and worry about the financial consequences later.  We were counting upon the tax deductibility of interest to offset our taxable income once we graduated and became employed.  That’s when Reagan began reeling back most of his tax cuts, closing so-called “loop-holes.” Chief among those “loop-holes” was the tax deduction for interest on student loans. 

We were caught.  The only substantial interest deduction that remained was for home mortgages.  We could not save enough money to buy a house because our cash flow was being depleted by non-deductible student loan repayment.  To make matters worse, we were living in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, where property values were depreciating at double digit rates annually.  Every few months, the San Francisco Chronicle would run a story that said, in essence, if you are thirty and do not yet own a home it is likely you never will.

Then a miracle occurred:  we were involved in a devastating car crash.  One beautiful winter day we decided to get up early in order to ski for the day at Sugar Bowl.  Sitting just off I-80, Sugar Bowl is a three hour drive from San Francisco in the Sierra Foothills.  The highway makes a steady ascent into the mountains.  Depending upon temperature and humidity, the “snow line” rises and falls to different elevations.  As we approached the town of Colfax, we crossed that fateful line from clear highway to slick blanket of snow.  

The road began disappearing as accumulated snow encroached, reducing three lanes of highway to one narrow strip.  Cars pulled to the side of the road into the snow banks to install tire chains.  We stayed in the long, slow-moving line of cars, but when a car many spaces ahead stepped on its brakes it caused a chain reaction.  One by one, vehicles attempting to stop skidded and slammed into each other, some still on the road, others off to the side.  When we saw the brake lights on the car in front of us, my husband was able to control the skid of our car, coming to rest just inches away.  Without warning he yelled, “Hold on!”  He could see in the rear view window what I only felt on impact:  the car behind coming toward us at full speed.

What happened next is forever etched in my memory; it seemed to occur in slow motion.  Our car took the impact mostly on the left as the driver tried to steer away from our center.  With our brakes engaged, we skidded out to the right.  My husband somehow managed to direct the car between two parked vehicles, their owners on the ground struggling with chains.  But we could not stop; I watched the steel guardrail come closer and closer until we hit, hard.  The impact made a dull muffled sound as the body of our small Toyota crumpled in submission. It did not end there.  The impact caused us to bounce and skid again on the ice, spinning our car out of control until we slid backwards, again making impact with the guardrail but this time from behind, crumpling again as we took the hit.  By now we had given up steering and were holding on to each other, my knee breaking off the gear shift at some point in the many impacts.

It was reminiscent of Dorothy’s journey in the tornado; same for the quiet that remained after the whirling winds dissipated and the house landed in Munchkinland.  In our reality, the snow had piled ankle deep in a matter of minutes, creating that beautiful muffled silence that comes with fresh snow.  It took a few moments to account for ourselves:  no bleeding, no critical injuries.  Then we realized that we were snowed in, our failed wipers not revealing the scene beyond.  I opened my door and jumped out, suddenly aware of the pounding snow that obscured a junkyard of broken vehicles all around me.  Through the silence, we slowly became aware of an incessant horn approaching.  It was conveyed by a semi-truck.  The driver jackknifed the truck and it was heading down the highway broadside in our direction, out of control.  Do we stay in our car, or do we get out?

“I can’t move,” my husband said.  In a panic, I flashed to the memory of a made-for-TV movie where a passenger’s spinal cord was severed in a lesser accident.  I froze.  “I mean, I can’t open my door,” he clarified.  The impact had pushed the trunk forward into the car, causing the rear door to wrap around the driver’s door.  He was stuck in the well between the seat and the steering wheel—all six-foot-four of him.  As the truck continued to glide toward us, threatening to take out everything in its path, I did my best to help my husband pull himself from the car through the passenger’s side.  By this time, the snow was now knee deep.  We got over to the guard rail just as the truck screeched to a halt in front of us, missing our sad car by only a couple of feet.

It was hours until our car was towed to a State processing and patrol station that was fortuitously situated at the next exit on the highway.  There we got hot coffee and mounds of paperwork to complete.  We met the man who drove the car that hit us.  After we skidded away, he also hit the car in front of us.  He assured us that everything would be okay because he was an insurance broker and he was driving a company car.  When the adjuster came out, weeks later, to make good on my totaled car, he offered us a settlement check for pain and suffering.  With this money, and a little help from our landlord, we were able to buy our little rented house in San Francisco, thus establishing us homeowners in an impossible market.

Miraculously, no one was seriously injured in that pile-up on I-80 that day.  I discovered the next day that whiplash was a very real thing and not the invention of television lawyers.  It took months until the pain stopped; even today—almost 25 years later—my neck stiffens up with little provocation.  But I choose to see that pain as a reminder of some good fortune.  In a funny way, it helped us cross a line that we never would have reached on our own.  There’s no place like home.

Tomorrow's blog:  Paradigm Shift