A cold winters tale

Well, I guess you have to go back to work someday. It couldn’t have been a better day for it too. Freezing drizzle and wind with low gray clouds and the threat of ice on the bridges that scares us native Texans half to death and sends us to the store to stock up on food just in case this is the beginning of a new ice age. We call it “Stock Show weather” in my town. It reminds me of a really great ice storm we had back when I was a brand spanking new patrol officer.

We don’t get much in the way of winter weather here in Texas but when we do it is really nasty. This storm was a bad one. Several days of freezing temperatures was followed by a nice layer of freezing rain. The roads were covered in an inch thick layer of ice and yet they still expected me to show up for work on time for roll call.

Our crusty old Sergeant told us to get out there and find a good spot to sit and wait for a call to come in. “You young pups don’t go driving around trying to get into something; you’ll wreck a car and get a day off without pay. We’re short handed enough without you all going on a nice unpaid vacation”.

So my partner and I went out and snoozed through some routine calls but it was just dead. We worked about a dozen accidents and handed out a ton of “blue forms” for folks who had wrecked their cars on the ice. We got to witness a city bus come creeping up to an intersection, stop and then slide slowly sideways into the curb where it sat, unable to move forwards or back. The bus driver seemed to take it well.

Along about midnight the city turned into a ghost town. There was no one out on the streets and no calls coming in. We cruised slowly around with our tire chains rattling looking for something to get into despite our sergeants dire predictions. There was nothing.

Finally, I mentioned to my partner that with all this ice it was a shame that no one was out sledding. He laughed and reminded me that there also weren’t any good hills to slide down where the ice was thickest, which happened to be in the middle of the streets. I mentioned that we could pull a sled behind the police car since it had tire chains on the back and he foolishly agreed that this would be a lot of fun and would pass the time on a cold dark slow night.

I always kept a good stout rope in the truck of the car and we found a short piece of PVC pipe behind a warehouse to use for a handle. I tied a knot in the other end of the rope and slammed it in the trunk of the car. Then we went looking for a sled. We found a long packing crate that looked appropriately like a dog sled but it slid with all the grace of a dead buffalo.

I finally found the closest thing to a sled that can be had in Texas, a dumpster lid. Its smooth plastic corrugated shape slid across the ice like a dream. I “re-allocated it for official police use” and we were ready for the winter police Olympics.

We were assigned to a deserted industrial district just south of downtown that night and the wide open streets were perfect for sledding. I mounted our trusty dumpster lid sled and firmly grasped the tow rope. My partner gunned the patrol car and we were off in a spray of ice chips.

We howled down the empty streets slaloming back and forth behind the car. I was transported to the Yukon Territory where I was a grim faced lawman on the trail of a desperate man, mushing my trusty sled dogs through the frozen wasteland. After a good long ride we switched places because he wanted to try the sled and my throat was getting tired from howling.

I returned the favor and took him on a lovely little ride through the back alleys and side streets at a respectable clip. I rolled down the window to savor the cold clean night air and to hear his screams.

He finally let go of the rope and we switched again. I insisted on a more sedate pace and we took off again. This time I was getting the hang of steering our improvised arctic patrol sled. I was going along fine until we passed a line of street department guys in sand trucks heading out to sand the bridges. They gave us the stink eye from the cabs of their trucks as we passed. I snapped off a salute while holding the tow rope with the other hand to let them know that we public servants are on the job no matter what the conditions and that we appreciated their efforts to assist us by sanding the frozen streets and lets just keep this little incident between us, there’s really no need to tell anyone about this at all, especially not our sergeant. Then my partner spoiled the whole moment by slinging me into a curb while trying to get down a side street before they could write down the car number. That hurt real bad and tore a big hole in the back of my wool uniform pants too.

We gave up on the sledding after that and returned the dumpster lid to its place. We giggled like a couple of kids as we headed back to sector that night. We never heard anything about it from the street department guys either.