Hell on Ice

I'm a Texan. I love Texas. For me, there's no better place, unless we have ice. It's been a couple of years now since Dallas/Ft.Worth had a nasty ice storm and alas, our reprieve may be over. Cold weather depresses me anyway, but ice? Well, that's a living hell!

I've heard it said that we, Texans, can't drive in the snow. That myth can just be busted right now. We rock in the snow! We get our four wheelers out for the short trips and our kids fight over whose turn it is to wheelie out to the barn and back.

For the longer trips, we shift our trucks into four wheel drive and plow through the snow on banks and highway medians while we watch those misplaced yankies in their Volvos idle in traffic behind creeping sand trucks.

And, since it hasn't rained in 129 days, those of us who have sorely missed the sport of mudding (that's joy riding your four wheel drive truck through insanely deep mud), would love to make snow angels! No, that's not lying in the snow and moving your arms. It's taking your mud flaps off, gunning the truck and peeling out so the snow in your wake looks like angel wings. So, yes, Texans can drive in the snow. The trouble is, we don't get much snow.

What we get here is usually a thin sheet of ice that makes highway driving so treacherous that the roads are littered with wrecked cars and jack-knifed eighteen wheelers. It's not even safe to walk or take your four wheeler out because every few minutes, that sickening sound of crunching metal can be heard as another car veers off the road and slams into something or somebody. Schools close because the roads are too hazardous for buses. Hotels fill up so people don't have to make the drive back out to the suburbs from work and stranded parents scramble to find a place for little Johnny to go until they can make it home.

There are no shortage of jokes about Texas weather. I don't know if it's that way in other states but the saying goes that if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes. Well, I'm waiting.