The winter day I nearly died in Minnesota

(732 words)

I hadn’t really thought about how close I’d come to dying there until a friend mentioned fun things to do in Minnesota in January.

Dying didn’t make the list.

But what I was doing moments before I nearly did does.

Something fun to do in Minnesota in January?

Try doing donuts at 65 mph on a frozen lake in a Toyota Corolla with the walk-away insurance.

Now, that was fun.

And often deadly, as I was soon to learn in a profanity-laced tirade over my suicidal naiveté.

I’ve forgiven myself. I was so much younger then. Just a kid really. I had no rational grasp of how responsible adults were supposed to behave in potentially dangerous situations.

I was, I think, 42.

I was doing wacky feature stories for Details magazine. By then I had a treasure chest of great Americana, heartland stories about oddball rituals and offbeat individuals. Mille Lacs, Minnesota, in January had both in spades.

Mille Lacs is a 207 square-mile body of water that every winter becomes Minnesota’s third most populace city. It has plowed roads, pizza delivery, distinct neighborhoods and regular trash pick up at temporary $15,000 homes all atop a 3-feet frozen foundation.

It’s, well, cool!

With windchill temperatures regularly dipping to minus-60, of course it is.

That’s how I pitched the story and it’s all true.

It’s a great American spectacle. People living in some of our most harsh elements conceive ways to make it fun. They choose to do more than merely endure.

They enjoy.

My assignment was to spend three days out there on the ice, do some fishing and experience what it was like to party in one of these pimped out ice-fishing homes; some of them come with hot tubs, satellite TV and interior conditions so comfy that most everyone wears shorts and T-shirts.

It’s just like fishing in your living room only if your living room floor was entirely made of ice with 12 frisbee-sized holes in it.

It was great fun.

My second greatest memory was looking out the window and seeing a trio of eagles, each as big and sturdy as winged fire hydrants, feasting on the walleye entrails of the fish we’d just caught and gutted.

My greatest memory is the big bearded dude waving his arms and screaming for me to get my car off the ice.

Ice, you see, is organic. It grows and shrinks given the wind, the sun and other elemental conditions.

I’d vowed I’d drive my car right out onto the ice so I could say I’d driven a car on ice.

Again, cool. Right?

But I was doing the off-road equivalent of driving on ice. The actual “roads” are there for a reason. Men and women experienced in ice thickness take pains to find the most stable parts of the ice.

This I didn’t know.

So I pulled off the land, onto the ice, and just gunned it.

It was what I think driving on the Bonneville Salt Flats out in Utah must be like, only with about a 105-degree temperature differential.

Everything was white and smooth, glistening and slippery. I got it up over 60 and just cut the wheel.

Wheee! I did about a dozen donuts. It was like an amusement park thrill ride. I did it again. There’s a lot of room to do donuts on the frozen surface of a 207 square-mile lake.

I was about to do a third round when I saw a bearded man on a ski-doo making a bee line for me. He was waving his arm in alarm.

“You idiot!” he said. “Get the car off here. You’re gonna kill yourself!”

He told me I was driving on unstable ice and that every year four or five idiots like me fell through and drowned.

Even if you survive drowning or hypothermia, they make you pay about $5,000 to salvage the vehicle from the lake bottom 30-feet down.

So a good day almost went really, really wrong.

Funny, I’d never thought how close I’d come to dying until my friend mentioned fun things to do in Minnesota in January.

Recklessly driving a nearly 2-ton vehicle across an indeterminate thickness of frozen lake was sure fun.

I’m glad I did it.

I’m even more glad I didn’t die when I did.

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Suspect runs across frozen Pittsburgh river; a different kind of winter escape

(845 words)

A Pittsburgh burglary suspect’s daring escape attempt has me recollecting all the questionable adventures I’ve had on frozen bodies of water.

Running from the police isn’t among them.

William McManus, 25, is alleged to have ripped off armfuls of scratch-off lottery tickets from a downtown convenience store.

I say “alleged” because I remember being instructed in journalism school it’s the until-proven-guilty fair designation and because I don’t want to disqualify myself from potential jury duty.

Case details sound fascinating and I’m in one of those periodic slumps where the $12-a-day jury duty compensation would seem like a gaudy windfall.

McManus has a history of petty thievery. Confronted by police with a coat full of stolen lottery tickets, he certainly considered the consequences if caught and convicted.

It’s a choice all criminals face when nearing apprehension: Surrender, fight or flight.

The moment was immortalized in the 1971 “Dirty Harry” movie when Det. Harry Callahan asks the suspect about his intentions as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Callahan says, “‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would probably blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’

“Well, do ya, punk?”

This, I think, should be part of every suspect’s Miranda Rights.

I’d like to think if the question was posed in that way to McManus, he’d have had the pluck to respond, “I’ve got about a hundred lottery tickets in my coat. Of course I feel lucky!”

Either way, McManus took off.

But he didn’t run to a getaway car or down some dark alley.

He ran straight to the Allegheny River.

Oh, the exhilaration he must have felt because the Allegheny River is frozen solid.

I wonder if he felt like Princess Elsa does when she builds the magical ice bridge across the chasm. He must have been congratulating himself on his genius.

His midnight escape was not without risks. I know this because I once fell through a pond that looked frozen.

I was playing golf.

It was a warm early spring day. The fairways were clear, but the ponds were still frozen, or so it seemed.

Knowing this, I cunningly tried to gain an advantage by skipping my ball off the ice on a dogleg par 5.

The ball came to rest in the middle of the pond. As the match was tight, I didn’t want to lose a stroke so I gingerly crept out on to the ice and took a mighty whack.

I made good contact, but the commotion caused my back leg to break through the ice up to my knee. I was very lucky.

Had both legs broken through I might have been soaked clear up to my waist and forced to miss post-round drinks. I learned that day it’s a very shallow pond.

I was so much younger then. More reckless. Just a stupid kid, really.

It was 2011.

Probably the closest I ever came to truly dying was in 2000. I was doing a story about the ice fishing on Mille Lacs, Minnesota. It’s a 207-square-mile lake that every year freezes solid enough to sustain a population of ice fisherman big enough to qualify as the state’s third largest city. There’s roads, regular trash pick up, pizza delivery — you name it — all on a 3-foot bed of ice.

The problem is vast parts of it are unsafe.

The first thing I did was unwittingly drive my rent-a-car on one of the unsafe parts and begin doing donuts. I was having a great time until I spied a concerned citizen dashing out on the ice waving his arms. He told two or three fools die every year doing what I was doing.

He’d saved my life. Then he took me to a nearby pub and bought me a beer.

I still send him a Christmas card every year. Some years it’s for saving my life, some years for buying me the beer. 

Those are my two best on-ice adventures. 

I’m sure the fleeing McManus thought he was going to have a dandy story. Maybe he thought once he’d made it safely across the river, he was home free.

Wrong.

Because the Allegheny River isn’t an international border.

And in another miscalculation, he forgot there are Pittsburgh Police on both sides of every Pittsburgh river.

In fact, if I’m reading the story right, the officers who’d tried to arrest him on the river’s downtown side simply got in their cruiser, drove across one of our many bridges and were waiting for him as the suspect scampered up the river bank.

Still, I don’t believe the escape was in vain.

A crafty attorney can certainly get the resisting arrest charge dismissed.

After all, McManus in a way obeyed when the officers yelled, “Freeze!”

We’ve been freezing in Pittsburgh all month.

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