Grandpa didn’t impart any wisdom to me on his deathbed. But if he had, he most certainly would not have said, “Sonny, now don’t you walk on no frozen river!” Because some things are just common sense.
But a lot of Pittsburghers must’ve passed on Common Sense and pressed C5, for a bag of Cheetos, from the Great Vending Machine of Life.
With temperatures staying below freezing for much of January, it didn’t take long for local media to begin carrying reports of people walking on Pittsburgh’s three frozen rivers. Even national news picked up the stories. The trend began Jan. 28, when a Pittsburgh man caught trespassing at a former Veterans Administration site near Highland Park fled from police by walking onto the frozen Allegheny. He managed to slip-slide away for three hours but was arrested when he came back to shore about 4 miles north. I suppose this story really isn’t funny, but it occurred to me that it would have been ironic if he went onto the ice to escape from ICE, which was operating not far away, in Oakmont.
I thought this would be an isolated incident until TV reports two weekends ago showed a number of adults — some accompanied by children — walking and cavorting on the ice of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers near the Point and North Shore. As the late, beloved Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope might’ve said, “Yoi and double yoi!”
But perhaps I’m being too harsh on our western Pennsylvania brethren. On Feb. 4, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran this headline: “A ‘significant’ portion of the Schuylkill is frozen. Don’t do anything stupid.” The local NBC TV outlet in Washington, D.C., warned: “Don’t walk on the icy Potomac River. If you fall in, here’s how fast hypothermia sets in.” And tempting fate on ice is not an exclusively American trait. The Reuters news service reported on Feb. 3 that people were walking and skating on the frozen Motlawa River in Gdansk. And residents of Kyiv, Ukraine, held a dance party on the frozen Dnipro River.
Forget what people say about music being the universal language. I think it must be, “Hey! The river’s frozen! Let’s go out there!”
In Pittsburgh, the best anti-ice advice came not from public safety officials or emergency personnel, but from National Weather Service hydrologist Alicia Miller. “There’s going to be pockets that are very thin or open,” she said of the Allegheny, “and if someone steps in the wrong place, they can go under. And they’re not going to come back up.”
And yet we continue to tempt fate. Why?
Maybe we have a vague, nostalgic memory of the 1862 Currier and Ives lithograph called “Central-Park, Winter. The Skating Pond,” a print that remains quite popular almost 165 years after it first appeared. The scene depicts hundreds of gaily attired men, women and children — and at least one dog — skating, sliding, walking and falling on the frozen 38-acre lake in mid-Manhattan. Looks quite inviting — safe, even.
I doubt that there are any Currier and Ives prints called “Central-Park, Winter. People screaming after falling through ice.”
But maybe there should be.