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Today (Tuesday) we had a high of almost sixty degrees. Tonight we're expecting 2 to 5 inches of snow. Tomorrow should warm up to near fifty. Thursday they are predicting seventy degrees. Then Friday and Saturday . . . more snow. (I didn't make that up. The national weather service did). Our snow rarely sticks around for more than a few days before simply turning to vapor, leaving a smoke-like trail as it heads back into our dry air, often without even bothering to melt.
Growing up in the north east, I remember snow melting very differently. Sometimes when it snowed in November, it melted in February. In between these times, it often compressed into solid ice. I vividly remember a drive in such conditions one night. My father coaxed our car to a hundred yard stop from the terrifying speed of about ten miles per hour once. Our Impala Wagon came to a halt a couple feet from the intersection (well done Dad!).
Unfortunately, the guy coming the other direction must have been going twelve miles an hour. Instead of stopping, his car spun in a slow, lazy glide. It had the energy of an amusement park ride winding down long after the exciting part was over. Still, it was coming right at us. My family let out a collective gasp. We gripped seats and dashboard tight. Then in silence we watched the other car, spinning, sliding and shushing past in slow motion. It missed us by inches. Even more amazingly, the car spun another twenty five yards into a crowded parking lot and came to a rest without touching a single vehicle. We drove the remaining few miles home at a nervous five miles per hour.
I cannot say for certain, but perhaps it was this same storm which blessed us with sidewalks of pure, silky ice. And yes, I mean blessed. For as a twelve-year-old, there was little more exciting than flying down a sidewalk covered with ice as smooth as if Frank Zamboni himself had put it there. To my regret, I never tried it on skates. That's probably just as well since helmets were considerably less chic than they are now. Instead, half a dozen of us would convoy down the sidewalk on Flexible Flyers.
This was all good and fine if you weren't the guy who owned the house at the bottom of the street. You see the hill culminated with the sidewalk taking a sweeping left turn. While Flexible Flyers do maneuver adeptly in snow, they suffer quite a bit on ice. At the end of a couple days and perhaps seven thousand sled runs, we'd managed to carve through the snow on his lawn . . . and the grass on his lawn. Had he wanted a ditch, we'd made fair headway on it. Apparently, he did not want a ditch.
Rather than thank us for this endeavor, he did a little work overnight. I was second in the convoy the next day. Denny, the kid in front of me, left his sled abruptly in my path. A moment later I struck the sled he'd rudely parked in my path. I was confused until my own sled's momentum was violently eradicated. I slid over his sled landing squarely on Denny (who was himself rudely parked my path). We were relieved at the lack of any apparent injuries for approximately one tenth of a second. The four sledders behind us screamed in procession. Then they added more steel, rope, oak and bodies to the mess on the sidewalk.
Mercifully the demolition derby ended. We disentangled our limbs and sleds, realizing that by some miracle none of us had been permanently maimed. Our neighbor had painstakingly chipped the ice from his sidewalk and sanded it. Perhaps his only goal was to make sure that no one slipped and fell. I doubt that he envisioned a multi-sled accident as the result. He couldn't have created a more sinister sledding disaster if he'd wanted.
Be safe out there my friends!
