A Milan area couple spent more than seven hours trapped in their car stuck in the snow during Sunday’s whiteout conditions.
John Handeen and his wife, Marilyn, both 85, were en route about 5:30 p.m. from his farm to Milan along a county road when he lost control of the car after hitting a patch of ice under a snow drift and ploughed into a deeper drift at the side of the road. The car was half-buried and would not move, John said Tuesday.
Marilyn said he was determined to walk to his farm to get a tractor, but she insisted that he stay in the car. Marilyn, generally a soft-spoken woman, said “That’s when I got a little demanding. I told him we’d always been told to stay with the car in case of a winter accident, and he was not to leave me alone. We couldn’t even see a yard light in the dark and the snow drifting.
“So then we started calculating how much gas we had and John figured out how long we could run the car on that.”
“I figured we could run the engine for 15 minutes every hour to keep warm,” John said.
Marilyn found candles in the back seat, left from decorating her church at Christmas, and matches. They located a tin can, put a candle in it, lit it and scrounged for anything else that might come in handy. John, a dedicated reader, had some books picked up at the Goodwill and Marilyn hoped he’d have something she’d like.
“With him it’s usually algebra or physics or chemistry, but I found something nice — a book about friendship,” she chuckled. “The candle we’d lit was a scented one, vanilla, and it gave enough light to read and it smelled good and we were warm enough. It was kind of romantic.”
The hours passed, with John running the engine every so often, and they noted that the temperature had risen two degrees from 12 to 14 degrees. Finally around 12:30 a.m. a bright light shone behind their car.
A figure appeared in the swirling snow, shoveling a passage to the front doors of the car.
Aziz Ansari from Watson, a friend of the couple, had been searching for them for about three hours when he spotted the car deep in the drift. When he had cleared a way to the door, he wrenched it open, looked in at the two sitting calmly, lit by candlelight, and his first words were “What are you doing here — celebrating a honeymoon?”
Ansari helped the Handeens into his four-wheel drive truck where their son Paul waited and ploughed his way to John’s farm, then to Marilyn’s in Milan.
John, a survivor of a heart bypass and due for his third pacemaker, has always been a stubborn and self-reliant Norwegian. Early Monday he was out clearing his lane and the county road.
He said Tuesday “I don’t believe in taking it easy. I’m just getting my tractor out to go get the car; it’s still stuck out there.”
His advice after the adventure? “Everybody should carry candles in the car. You can get more heat out of candles than anything. We only used two in all that time. Oh, and be sure to take matches. We were all right. We had three-fourths tank of gas and I figured we could run the car 15 minutes every hour and stay comfortable.”
Marilyn is less blase. “I have never seen that road so deep. It was luck or something else watching out for us. The only reason they knew we were missing is because I didn’t call my son Paul as I always do, and the only reason they found us was because they turned the wrong way.”
Paul, worried when he did not hear from his mother by 9:30 p.m., called Ansari because he knew Ansari and the Handeens had been at a presentation in a Willmar church earlier in the day. Paul has a small car so Ansari insisted on taking his four-wheel truck to look for the missing couple.
The men rushed off with a borrowed cell phone, no shovels and no idea where to look. At John’s farm first, they were stuck in the deep drifts in the lane and scrounged a shovel of Handeen’s to get the truck out.
Ansari said he doesn’t remember how long they shoveled. “The wind kept blowing — we moved the snow and it kept blowing back with the wind in our faces. The four-wheel drive was lifted off the ground by all the snow under it. We took turns shoveling and finally got moving.”
They made their way through blizzard conditions down the farm lane, then made a turn to the west, instead of the east as they had intended. Unable to turn, they continued toward the next cross road.
“By golly, there they were. All we could see was the red glint of their tail lights because it is a white car, half buried in the snow. It had piled up enough I don’t think they could have got the doors open,” Ansari said.
Ansari, a native of Pakistan, said he did nothing unusual in rushing into the night to look for the couple. “I just had to go. God pushed me and I went. We (the Handeens and I) have had more than three cups of tea together, and in Pakistan when you have shared three cups of tea you are family.”
