Columns

 I've resided in North Idaho for 10 months and if current conditions hold, I dare say, I survived my first winter for a desert dwelling “Zonie.”

Admittedly, I was a little nervous after hearing some of the locals making scary noises about ‘96,” and being “due.” To our good fortune, the weather, unlike pregnancy and taxes, does not have a due date.

At any rate, I have learned a lot since I have been here, especially about ice. In my previous life, ice was something that we cooled our drinks with, period.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the ice in North Idaho. To be perfectly honest with you, I have found it to be intrusive, obnoxious, sport an attitude, and at times it even displays a real mean streak. Initially I was naive toward its intentions.

I recall how much I enjoyed seeing the icicles form on the eaves of my deck, only to return later and find them two feet longer and aimed menacingly at my spleen, poised to impale me to my own wall. And slippery.

Forget trying to walk on it, the mere movement of the earth's rotation will jerk your feet out from under you when you are standing on North Idaho ice.

The clincher came a few weeks ago, though, during the all-out offensive it staged when the temperatures dipped to sub zero. Some time before I had lost a set of keys that I use only occasionally, and for which I had no duplicates.

While working outside during the “cold snap,” I happened to notice them in a large container that had filled with water and froze solid. Happy as I was to finally locate them, I set about to chip them out of the ice with a screwdriver.

No go. Nor could I move the container; it was frozen solidly to the ground. I wanted the keys, and I was ready to drive this nail to the board. With pick axe in hand, I heaved back and gave it my best shot, several of them in fact.

With aching back and what felt like shattered elbows I stopped. Right then and there a deep kinship formed with Solzhenitsyn's character, Ivan Denisovich. Yes brother, I too know what it feels like to futilely beat myself against the ice.

The curtain dropped abruptly on this scene, however, because I was informed of another calamity requiring my attention that made this one look like a flyspeck. The water pipes in my rentals froze.  But what the heck, those keys weren't going anywhere.

Jeneen Schuler owns The Naples Inn.