Driving home tonight was a little nerve-wracking. Cold, wet, misty, rainy, sleety. Perfect conditions for black ice.
For those of you from more temperate climes, black ice (and I'm resisting the urge to capitalize it) is the most slippery substance in the Universe. Even studded snow tires won't help you on black ice.
And, unfortunately, it looks exactly like wet pavement.
So you don't even know you're on it until your car starts to slither in directions you have no desire to go in. (Sorry. In which you have no desire to go. My 8th grade English teacher would have had me diagramming sentences for a month...)
My driving philosophy is to assume it's slippery until proven otherwise. This has kept me out of a lot of ditches.
Home safe and sound. If there was black ice out there tonight, I fooled it completely.
6 comments:
So glad so glad you tricked that ice. It is the work of the devil in my mind. THere is no weather worse than that.
I am well acquainted with black ice - as well as the thin coating of slush that greases roads better than butter and is almost as bad as black ice -I applaud your tactics!
Black Ice (and *I* think it deserves capitals, too), is one of the banes of drivers in England. We don't get enough really bad wintry weather for folks to be confident winter drivers, and whereas snow has the entire population crawling along at 20 mph, most folks don't even recognise black ice until they're going sideways. Worse, they don't realise that that's why *you* are being cautious, and they overtake you in a blaze of spinning wheels and growling testosterone. Briefly.
Well done, you.
I've had two close calls with Black Ice. (Go ahead, capitalize it. It deserves it.)
That's enough for me. (My momma always said the third time is the charm. Or third strike and you're out.)
The Ice is sneaky but we are smarter.
My mother, who used to be an english teacher, told me once that the rule about not ending a sentence in a preposition was lifted from Latin. And since English isn't actually Latin based, we don't have to follow all their language laws (which is good, I don't think I could ever handle having to decline my nouns) In fact the rule about prepositions at the end of sentences in English goes in and out of fashion every few hundred years.
Oops, didn't mean for this to become a leture... And now you know.
Good work to make it home safely, albeit with a few tense muscles, no doubt. I think black ice is a new invention -- never heard of it until about 20 years ago. Before that we just called it "slippery."
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