In January and February of 1985, the Atlanta area experienced an infrequent serious cold spell. One day the official temperature at the airport was -8F. It was -10F in the boonies up north where I lived (outside Marietta) and worked (outside Norcross).
After more than two weeks of temperatures averaging below freezing, the pond by work was frozen to a depth of at least a foot. Kevin and John, both from Ohio, proclaimed it frozen enough to walk on. Kevin was amazed to learn the reason two of us kept asking was that we wanted to go play on the ice. "What's the big deal?" he asked several times.
The big deal, of course. was that we had grown up in the south, and neither of us had ever seen a body of water frozen enough to walk on. And so we did. We walked, we slid, we tried to run, we whooped, we hollered. Kevin and John watched for a minute, then headed back inside, laughing at us.
A couple of guys built like college football linemen wandered to the edge of the pond ten yards away from us. They looked back and forth at the ice and us. Finally one yelled, "Is it safe?"
"Sure. Just take it easy!"
Whereas we stayed within ten feet or so of the shore, they went straight to the middle of the pond, and proceeded to cut up like little kids. One of them fell. "CRRRAAAACCCKKKK!" Said the ice. We heard and watched the crack race away from the fallen man toward the edges, in two directions. Suddenly there were two pieces of ice on the pond, not one. It got very quiet. We all froze, so to speak.
The guy who fell started trying to get up. We were thirty feet away, near shore, and we could feel the ice move. We heard grinding and cracking. "Don't get up!" we yelled. "Just pull him gently and slowly to shore, away from the crack!"
They looked at each other. Slowly the guy on the ground raised an arm; his friend carefully (and slowly) hauled him to land. It worked just fine. How did two southern boys (and me a desert rat) know what to do? I don't know. It may be because we were voracious readers, or perhaps just because we were geeks, engineers, problem solvers at heart. But nobody had to be drug, shivering from hypothermia, out of the water, so it was a good day.
After that, we stuck to what we'd been doing before, racing our RC cars on the ice. We stayed on shore. Within a week or two, the ice age was over.
I had to wear a suit at JHK (long since bought by another company); the photo is of me, barefoot, in tie but sans coat, on the ice. Our camera didn't do a lot of zooming. This was as zoomed in as Kevin could get.
(I was thinking about rotating this photo 90 degrees, but was afraid I would fall. It's hard enough staying up on ice barefoot when the ice is horizontal.)
