Feeling flurries of panic

IT simply is not true that I’m a bad driver. The people who spread that damaging rumor don’t understand that a treacherously narrow driveway was the reason I occasionally collided with the side of my Los Angeles apartment building.

By occasionally, I mean two or three times a year.

But last winter on a driving trip in the Canary Islands, I encountered something far more treacherous than a skinny driveway. Really.

Europeans take winter vacations in the Spanish Canaries because the seven-island chain stays hot and sunny through their cold season. They pack bikinis and sun block, as I did for a flight from Paris to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with a change of planes in Madrid.

As luck would have it, I missed the connecting flight in the Spanish capital and didn’t reach Tenerife until about 10 p.m. By that time I was tired. Besides, it makes me nervous to drive in a strange place after dark. It makes me nervous to drive in a strange place, period.

Nonetheless, I picked up an economy-class rental car and set off toward an inn on the flank of El Teide, the 12,198-foot volcano on Tenerife. I thought it was about 40 miles to the hotel, so I figured I’d get there in time to have a late dinner.

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Cliffhanger

AT first I had a grand time as I left behind the lights of the coast and climbed into the mountains, even though I was driving on a switch-backing road that was bordered on both sides by steep precipices. It would have been nice if there had been barricades, some sign of habitation and other vehicles. And I could have done without the fog, but, really, the rain didn’t faze me.

About an hour after I left, as I expected to see the welcoming lights of the inn, the rain turned to snow -- pretty, light, wet flakes. At first. Then they began getting thicker.

My hands clenched the wheel, and I slowed the car to a crawl. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead and didn’t know how to work the defroster. When I braked, the traction-less wheels skidded. I couldn’t remember. Do you turn into a skid or away from it?

OK, so I have little experience driving in winter conditions. But who would have expected a snowstorm in the Canary Islands?

There was no place to turn around. Even if there had been, I wouldn’t have risked it on a razorback ridge in zero visibility. Finally, I stopped the car in the middle of the road and rummaged through my bag for my cellphone. My trusty cellphone. My faithful cellphone.

My signal-less cellphone.

Now I was scared -- as scared as I was when a guy held a knife to my chest and demanded money in Mexico’s Copper Canyon.

I sat in the car shaking, watching my breath turn into vapor, trying to remember the inn’s cancellation policy, the word for “snow” in Spanish, looking for the first signs of frostbite, wondering whether my niece would use wisely the money she would inherit from me when I came home from the Canaries in a coffin.

Suddenly, I saw headlights. I jumped out of the car and stood in the road, waving and yelling. The vehicle stopped, and a man got out. I didn’t take the time for explanations, which would have been futile anyway, because he and his wife spoke no English.

I ran back to my trunk, got my bag and jumped into the back seat of his reassuringly large SUV, using gestures to make them understand that if they didn’t give me a lift I’d die in the snow.

But first I had to give the man my keys so he could move my car. He had an easier time maneuvering it onto the shoulder than I do negotiating my L.A. driveway. We left the car there with snow piling up around it. The rental agency, which had failed to mention that I might meet inclement weather in the mountains, could jolly well come back and get it when the ice finally thawed in the blasted, semitropical Canary Islands.

My rescuers seemed untroubled by the road conditions. They were listening to salsa music and drinking red wine from plastic cups, which I declined. I sat as stiff as a telephone pole, my seat belt buckled tight, until we reached civilization.

It was 2 a.m. by the time the couple dropped me in the town of La Laguna at an inn, where I tried to take a hot bath in a bathtub without a drain stopper and then collapsed into bed.

The next morning, I woke up to warm, sunny skies.

When I called the rental agency, the clerk said, “What were you doing on El Teide? It snowed up there last night.”

No kidding.