MacGougan at Large

Notes on My Dangerous Neighborhood - 2

Ice

As noted in a prior posting, my neighborhood is on a hillside. The streets and driveways here go up and down, sometimes at a pretty steep angle. My neighborhood is also located in Connecticut - a place one of my former colleagues liked to call “The Mixed Precipitation State”. This is not an ideal combination.

An icy hill is not a safe place to drive or walk the dog or do pretty much anything else. My winter athlete friends tell me that an icy hill isn’t even a good place to ski.

Here’s a recent example with a happy ending. As both original subscribers will no-doubt remember, this column began with notes from a family vacation to Hawaii. The night before my wife and I were slated to leave on that big trip, the local forecast was for freezing rain overnight. My wife - being the brains of the operation - thought it would be wise to park our car at the top of our driveway, rather than risk being trapped and missing our flight. 

This turned out to be a vacation-saving act of genius. After a night of freezing rain, our driveway - which goes down from the road - was a luge run. We needed to strap cleats onto our boots and proceed inch by inch in order to get ourselves and our bags up to the car. It only remained, at that point, to get the car de-iced and then to creep down the street toward flat land, the highway, and the airport.

I’ll say this, however. Starting the day in that way did help us all the more to appreciate our trip to Hawaii.