On Wednesday, Jan. 11, I got into my car a little earlier than normal and headed off to work. There were things I needed to do at school, and I’ve found that those precious hours before anyone else shows up are the most valuable.
It’s easy to putter around and waste time in the afternoon, but there’s no frittering around in the morning. I’d heard that the roads might be a little tricky, and I wanted to give myself a little extra driving time.
About a mile from home, I realized that things were much worse than I had imagined. A light rain had fallen during the night, but this came on the heels of a very cold week and the ground was freezing cold. The result was a road that looked bare, but was in fact covered with a perfect shell of glaze ice. This was of particular concern, because I live near the top of a hill and there is no way to leave my house without going down a slope of some kind.
If I head west, I encounter the gentlest slope, but there is one spot where the road traverses a ravine and there are deep ditches on either side of a nasty patch of road where it climbs a steep hill and goes around a corner at the same time.
If I head east and then north, I encounter a fairly consistent set of little drops in altitude without any particularly bad turns.
If I head east, I mean to hurt myself, for there lies the steepest slope with the sharpest turns — great for sightseeing in the fall, but certain death in the winter.
The track to the east and then north is my normal route, and as I approached the stop sign where I make my change in direction, I found myself sliding like a hockey puck. It was dark, there were no lights from oncoming traffic, so I decided not to fight with momentum. I barely made the turn, but I knew I was in trouble. There was no way I could get back. Forward meant downward, which was all I could do in my front-wheel drive.
I miss my Jeep!
Long story short, I ended up in a ditch. Physics caught up with me when an oncoming salt truck left me with an awful choice: head-on with a plow truck or a slow motion slide into the ditch at the side of the road.
When I was in graduate school, I had an old truck that had some fairly pathetic emergency brakes, and I can remember stomping the pedal to the floor and still rolling backward with no power brakes or steering because the engine was off. From time to time, I have the no-brakes dream, but this time it was real and it was terrible.
My car was nose-down in the ditch, and I felt the front end continue to settle into the ice, snow and water. Every time I moved, I felt the car shift, and even though there was nowhere it was going to go, it was an unpleasant feeling.
I pulled the emergency brake handle (my current car has very good emergency brakes) but the car continued to shift. I finally got out and discovered that both rear wheels were up off the pavement — so much for good brakes.
As I stood there in the dark, completely and utterly stuck, I found myself thinking about the animals in my neighborhood. A thin coating of ice might not be a real hardship for them, but a generous coating of ice might present them with real problems.
Squirrels, safe in a leaf nest or a tree cavity, could probably just sleep in. A thick layer of fat would be the perfect antidote to a thick layer of ice that would make climbing trees rather tricky.
On the other hand, the local birds would be in much more serious trouble. Chickadees and nuthatches are famous for caching food for a rainy day, but ice would effectively lock all of these stored supplies out of reach; all that conscientious work for naught. Sparrows and finches would be in even more trouble. The chickadees might find a morsel or two that were spared, but birds that feed on the ground would be more likely to find the entire landscape closed for business on a morning that they might be at their most desperate.
Most songbirds spend the winter months flirting with death. Their small bodies require lots of fuel to keep their temperatures up at levels that would make humans feel feverish and ill.
The need for food is compounded by the fact that winter nights are the longest of the year. This puts little birds in the precarious position of surviving the night only to spend the day fattening up for the next night. If birds get wet, they lose heat faster, making their need for food all the more desperate. To have food locked away under a coating of ice could be the back-breaker that costs many birds their lives.
Human technology got me safely out of the ditch. I paid the tow truck driver, turned around and went home slightly annoyed, but very lucky overall.
“No more early morning drives in the ice,” I thought to myself, which made the following Wednesday all the more interesting — another storm brought a more serious layer of ice and I called in without thinking twice.
The birds in my yard were very hungry, and I hoped a fresh supply of seed might be a lifesaver for at least one of them.
Bill Danielson has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, and the Massachusetts State Parks. He has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 19 years and he also teaches high school biology and physics. Visit www.speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.