Lynchburg didn’t get much snow,
which was good for me. Unfortunately, I
didn’t realize how much freezing rain and of course, ice, Virginia gets. We didn’t have many winter weather days
either, classes were only canceled a few times throughout my four year
stay. What was frustrating was that
classes would be canceled for an inch of snow, but not when the entire campus
was a sheet of ice.
Ice
and I are not friends. When it was bad
enough, I would skip class, sometimes just my morning classes until they could
get the sidewalks cleared up. I don’t
know why I went to class at all on one particular day, maybe I had a test, but
I can’t remember my reason for trekking out.
I only remember this day because something mortifying happened to me,
and at the age of twenty, it may as well have been the end of the world.
Our
campus had a main section called “the dell.”
This was in the center of many of the main buildings and dorms. In the center of the dell was a circle of
benches and flowers where all the sidewalks which extended from the buildings
met. This convergence of sidewalk was
about half way from my dorm to the building I had class in. Not a long walk by any means. It was a small campus.
I
bundled myself up and put on my winter boots which I didn’t often have to use
at school. They were heavy duty boots, my parents wouldn’t have it any other
way, they had a thick rubber sole with strong grips meant for walking on ice
and snow. I stepped out the front door
of the third floor in Tate Hall and noticed that everything was covered in
ice. Wonderful!,
I thought. It was obvious that someone
had made a pretty feeble attempt to throw sand down. I can’t explain my annoyance with places that
use sand as a means of melting ice. Sand
gives a little bit of traction, but it quickly is washed (or wiped) away after
a few people walk through it. Being from
New England, I know that the only thing that works on ice is SALT.
I
started to walk to class. So slowly you
would think I was 110 years old. I
realized about ten feet from my dorm steps that walking in the grass would be a
better idea. Grass doesn’t usually form
a solid sheet of ice like sidewalks, so I moved into the grass and continued my
slow and steady pace. When I got to the
center of the dell I had to cross to the opposite length of sidewalk- there was
no way to stay on the grass. I needed to
go straight across and the benches were in a wide circle around the
outside. There was nothing for me to
hold on to. I paused for a second
weighing my options. I decided to go for
it.
