It’s Nice When a Person Can Depend On Things Being Consistent

    During my career, Lorraine and I spent two different stints in the state of Wisconsin---one three- year hitch in Rice Lake, which is in the northern part of the state, and another eighteen months in Shawano. That’s close to Green Bay, for those of you who are keeping track. In those parts of Wisconsin the winters get cold. The lakes freeze over to the point where the ice will support the weight of cars and whole communities of ice-fishing shacks.

    Let me digress: From where we lived in Rice Lake, we had to drive around the end of the lake to get to work or into downtown, about three miles. During the winter, we would drive across the lake on the ice, saving ourselves several minutes. During heavy snowfalls, the city would plow several ‘streets’ across the lake. It was rather exhilarating, knowing what you were doing, and also being able, when the snow was thin on the ice to spin a couple donuts, if there was no other traffic close by.

    Let me digress again: Just to show y’all how used to this phenomena we could get---One winter day Lorraine left for town and decided to cross on the ice. It was snowing hard, and had been accumulating on the ice for part of the day so was six or seven inches deep. Lorraine was dressed in a knee-length dress, heels, and a nice coat. Not a parka mind you, just a coat. The wind-chill was around ten below. 

Normally this kind of weather was no big deal. Everyone dressed for it and if we were driving anyplace away from other traffic, would carry sleeping bags, water, and a few emergency rations in the car.

So here was Lorraine heading across a mile of ice, during a heavy snow, dressed so that if she had to get out of the car, which nobody up there in their right mind would do, would have only a short time before frostbite, and hypothermia killed her. On the way across the lake on this trip, she lost sight of the graded road twice and had to work her way out of the deep snow.

The amazing part of this digression is that Lorraine thought nothing of this adventure. A little indication of what too much cold will do to the brain.

Anyway, back to what I started out to say. I recently saw this news story saying that in Wisconsin, fifteen cars had fallen through the ice on Lake Geneva. These drivers had been there for some function.

The thing that this brought to mind was that every year in the fall, a number of people, anxious to get on the ice, usually a pickup pulling a fishing shack, would fall through the ice which was not yet thick enough to hold the weight. It never failed. Those vehicles were usually just left there until spring, and then removed. Most of the lakes are not that deep.

In the spring, the same thing would happen. A couple people felt that they just had to get out on the ice one last time for some reason or another, and thinking the ice could not have melted that much, would fall through. The only difference between fall and spring was that in the spring the drivers didn’t have to wait as long to recover their vehicles.

Other people contemplating using the ice used these two instances to gauge whether the ice was safe yet, or whether the safety feature had melted away. No pun intended.

It’s nice to see that people are still miscalculating the ability of Wisconsin ice to hold the weight of their vehicles.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In a way, it’s comforting.