Ice, Ice Baby

I was never much of a cold weather person. No, let me rephrase that. I hated the cold. I loathed the cold. I utterly despised everything about the cold. Then on a 2002 road trip I took before my intended move from California to Austin, Texas, I fell in love with Madison, Wisconsin; and I knew that to pursue that love—and the love for this city was so deep and hopless I could do nothing but—I would have to learn to tolerate... no, embrace... The Great White Cold.

My first winter here I bought ice skates and cross-country skis and learned to use them. I bought YakTrax, gizmos that fit on the bottom of my running shoes so I could continue that foolish pleasure on snow and ice with less potential for busting my ass. They say there's nothing worse than a convert. I knew I'd gone to The Cold Side when last winter I was upset that we'd had a month of daily temps above freezing. A Coldie to the core. No, no, not me. Why me, God?

But it doesn't stop there. Now I've fallen in love with this Wisconsin Yankee who believes with all his heart and will even say right out loud, "There's no day that snow doesn't make better." (He appears otherwise normal.) Scott's favorite musical—despite repeated exposure to the best of Broadway in which he delights—remains the Wisconsin original Guys on Ice, a saga of two guys ice fishing and singing such fare as "Fish, the Miracle Food" and "Ode to a Snowmobile Suit". We saw it in Milwaukee this past New Year's Eve afternoon—my first time and Scott's third for this quirky sub-zero version of Waiting for Godot. I loved it. Converted yet again.

Scott owns an ice boat with three other like-minded... er... men-boys. (For more information on this phenomenon of people who take the equivalent of an ice skate with a sail across frozen lakes at dangerously high speeds, see http://www.iceboat.org.) My friend Lori—a fellow Texas girl who moved here at about the same time I did and joined me in acquiring cold-weather sporting skills that first winter—upon meeting Scott and learning this fact, took me aside and all but held a knife to my throat. "I have been waiting four years for you to get a boyfriend with an ice boat. [Who knew?] You will NOT screw up this relationship before I've gotten a ride in it."

The boys got the ice boat out a couple Saturdays ago, and the lake conditions were perfect—solid, smooth ice. Unfortunately, there was no wind, witnessed by one intrepid we saw pushing his ice boat across the lake. Scott and I hoped for conditions that would allow us to give it a whirl the next day, but that night brought major snowfall. So the prospects for ice boating are such that we will be obliged to stay together until next winter if only for Lori's benefit.

Last week Scott was in San Antonio on business, and in our before-bed phone chat, he described how unseasonably cold it was there. He and his colleagues had dined on the patio of a local restuarant where the outdoor heaters did not compensate for the 40-degree temperatures, leaving his poor, pasty Wisconsin legs numb below the knees. I was uncharacteristically churlish in giving no sympathy. Perhaps it was because I had just made my way home through a driving snowstorm. Maybe it was that my workout had entailed shoveling my sidewalk and driveway with the temperature yielding a mere 7 degrees and a windchill at somewhere around minus meat locker. Or perhaps it was being in the kind of cold that required me to chip my dogs off a fire hydrant with a ball peen hammer. Forty degrees? Pah! Wussies!

It's now Saturday. The weather prognostication is for high temperatures in the single digits and lows way below the line for the foreseeable future. This is a world of ice and snow with the Dr. Zhivago theme playing in the background. I'm home, Toto. There's no place like it.