Ice.

For someone who has spent a significant portion of his life in tropical environments, I have built an odd, extended relationship with snow and ice. Or perhaps it was just Winter seeking retribution, knowing I would escape, briefly, its icy embrace.

Growing up in Laurel Maryland, way back before it became subsumed into the inevitable metroplex, my brothers and I roamed the rural territories morning to night. Ice skating was a favorite pastime, although only my older brother John mastered the art of those slick driving speed skates.

Brother Bill and I preferred figure skates, because the teeth allowed for quicker starts and controlled stops. I tried speed skates but just couldn’t get it, landing with all four limbs splayed out on the ice like some arctic water bug.

In late spring the ice grew thinner in response to the call of physics, yet we would continue to skate on ice that was not safe. It was so thin in fact that the glassy surface would bend underneath our skates as we glided along, and form an ice “wake” behind us. This ice would would “sing” beneath our blades, a popping and echoing symphony caused by the contraction and expansion of frozen water, a fact unknown to us at the time. It was just so cool (no pun intended).

One day we pushed it too far and I went through and under, fortunately not far from the edge of the pond. I tried to crawl to the safety of land but the tipping ice sheets kept dragging me under, like an early failed experiment in evolution. I could briefly see the ice surface from under the water, a.k.a the wrong side of a frozen pond. I was eventually able to crawl ashore, soaked from head to toe in icy water. As we walked the mile to our house, my clothes began to freeze in the cold Maryland air until they were like cardboard–very cold and heavy cardboard. When I slid out of my pants on the porch, I remember that they stood up on their own, as if inhabited by the invisible man.

Thick ice doesn’t bend so easily. Once I fell on pond ice so thick and hard that I broke my collarbone. The doctor who examined me called it a “green break”, akin to how a green tree branch bends and splinters. For some reason this image of bone shards fanning out from my collarbone terrified me more than a clean break. I had to wear an ace bandage wrapped around both shoulders for weeks while the bone reset. I shudder today when I think about those *shards*, brrrrrr.

In earlier Good Stuff entries I have written about the toboggan rides down the hill and across the frozen pond. And the ice storms here in North Carolina that shut down traffic and snap tall trees like matchsticks.

In the big game of Fenton vs The Cold, the cold is definitely winning.