Where Ice and ICE Meet

I ’m about 20 blocks south of the epicenter of discord, and hence I do not drive 20 blocks north. Where I live in Minneapolis, there’s no drama. Occasionally, there’s one lady on a corner with a placard soliciting honks. Someone up the street has a lawn populated with signs expressing solidarity with all the Current Things, and I imagine her scrolling Facebook soaking in the horrors and stoking up the rage, but if we pass on the street, it’s a nod and a smile, since it’s generally assumed that people who live here are smart people, duly appalled by everything.

The sole example of the current unpleasantness happened a while ago during a nice warm streak. Temps in the upper 30s, if you can believe that. A surprising surge of heat softened the treacherous carapace of ice that locked every sidewalk. For a week, walking anywhere was an invitation to a busted hip or concussion. It works like this: The snow falls. Industrious early-morning walkers with dogs pack it down, and the snowblower doesn’t scour down to the concrete. There’s a sudden melt, and a sudden freeze, and now every street and sidewalk is covered with ice. Block after block. Cars whine going up the hill outside our house; old folks look at the slick surface and correctly decide a walk is like pogo-sticking through a minefield. People with eager pups are pulled down the sloping blocks without anything to hold on to, trying to get to the boulevard, where crusty snow provides some purchase.

When the temperature warms, the ice softens. You have an opportunity to do your civic duty and clear the paths. All around the neighborhood, you could hear people hacking at the ice with sharp bladed instruments, clearing steps and walks. I drove the blade into the sheets of frozen water, and watched chunks crack off. It is immensely satisfying, because it doesn’t just feel like you’re doing a good thing. It’s also revenge for the spills you took, the times your coccyx bounced on the ground.

I felt a tap on my wrist. My watch said: LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE TAKEN A HARD FALL. It was reacting to the pounding strokes of the ice-cleaving tool. I wondered if Governor Walz had gotten a message like that on his watch after he saw the reelection poll numbers. I tapped the button that said I did not require emergency assistance, and went back to work —

But what’s this? Whistles? Horns? I looked up to see a big black SUV pass, and right behind, in a battered yellow compact car, a woman staring at me with wide mad eyes. She was blowing a whistle. She was pointing at the SUV. She took the whistle out and said ICE! And she pointed again. I watched the SUV go to the end of the block and turn right. She followed close behind, horn blaring, whistle shrieking. It was a miracle she didn’t slide into the SUV at the bottom of the street, what with all the, er, well, you know.

A neighbor wandered over a few minutes later. “Are you winning?” he asked, pointing at the ice. I said I’d fallen three times but hacked off six yards, so it was a draw.

“Did you . . . see that car? Was that what I thought?”

“She seemed a bit spun up,” I said. He nodded.

“I thought we were done with all that,” he said, gesturing north to indicate the riots of 2020 and the sirens and the smoke.

“So did I,” I said.

We chatted a bit more, and I finished hacking what I could hack. I went inside to take a nap, but I looked at X before settling down and saw a post from a local guy who runs a tree service company and drives a big black SUV. He filmed a three-car convoy following him, thinking he was ICE. Horns and flashing lights.

I still love my town, but I am reasonably sure there were fewer lunatics here when I first arrived. I wondered if patrollers and checkpoint operators had sidewalks still covered with slick danger, and they’d ignored the opportunity to clear the common walks for the pleasure of tootling whistles and shouting F*** YOU. It was a good day to get rid of the ice, but no one ever got social-media hits for that.