One of the most troubling winter trends I’ve seen in Saskatchewan over the past winter and in what little of the long winter ahead of us I’ve seen so far, is a mistake committed behind the wheel. Drunk driving? No, that’s not in my crosshairs today.
This transgression is one that is done when sober (I presume), and it doesn’t even take place on the road. It takes place shortly after you exit the road, on the way to the lake to partake in the tried and true, quintessential Canadian winter pastime, ice fishing.
Let me cut the chase and spare you any more exposition. People have to stop driving out on the ice when it’s not thick enough.
I don’t know whether it’s got something to do with the pride and ego of the drivers doing it, or whether it’s just blind faith that a few cold days can make the ice thick enough to drive on, but we’ve already had two victims from this horrible, ill-informed behaviour.
Two fellas ended up in the hospital in Moose Jaw a little over a week ago because they thought it was okay to take their pickup tuck onto the ice that covers Buffalo Pound Lake. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. Their truck sunk in backwards, right up the cab.
Both of those guys walked away from that, but what would have happened if that truck had gone in cab-first?
This isn’t a one-off kind of thing either. This is a ubiquitous mistake that people keep making over, and over again. If you don’t believe me, stick the name of any popular lake in Saskatchewan along with the words “truck,” and “ice” into Google, and see what comes up. I’m sure there are a few benign results that will appear if you dig deep, but they are outnumbered by bad news. On that note, I’m just going to put it out there that I really don’t want to have to write about that kind of thing going on here, in Estevan. Hint-hint.
Even last winter, when the temperatures were as erratic as they were, people were routinely going out onto ice with uneven thickness, ice that barely had a chance to form with all the weird thaws going on that winter.
This isn’t something that there should be any uncertainty about. I have had the fact drilled into my head since I was still young enough to get excited about snow days, that the layer of ice on top of a body of water has to be at least 30 centimetres before you can take a truck out onto it. There is no ambiguity about that—it’s a number that you can measure.
Now, I imagine that it’s a hassle to auger a hole into the ice to check. You have to get out into the cold and go to all that effort to find out how thick the ice is. But you know what else is a hassle? The risk of losing your motor vehicle in a province I sure as hell wouldn’t want to not have a set of wheels in; the risk of drowning; the risk of hypothermia.
And to be fair, there’s the ancillary risk of humiliation when you get outed as one of the goofs who took a stupid risk and ended up making a spectacle of themselves.
At the base of this, the thing that really bamboozles me is that I can’t understand that mentality. Even in the dead-of-winter cold that gripped northeastern Alberta in late 2013 and early 2014, I was always nervous venturing out onto the ice. Sometimes I’d have to walk out onto the ice to cover events that involved ice fishing or outdoor hockey and the sight of people, and their vehicles, hundreds of feet out in the middle of rural bodies of water like Stony Lake would make me uneasy.
Even rationally knowing the ice was more than thick enough and seeing it physically measured in front of me, the thought of being out on top of it made me very uncomfortable.
So, you know, kudos to those of you who don’t suffer that irrational form of anxiety, but for Pete’s sake, check the ice before you go out on it.
