Relative Something

Not much worth doing on the ranch after a heavy rain downpour in January is followed by plummeting temperatures. Especially when it falls way below zero Fahrenheit. Everything is ice. Extreme ice. It is brutal in so many ways.

First off, our driveway is a disaster. Cyndie suggested I try cleaning it by plowing with the tractor the day after it rained. I balked, fully aware that doing nothing would lead to this, but there were small odds I would have had much success with plowing. Under the slush, it was too icy to provide enough traction, even with chains on the tires. Also, it was still warm enough that the wet slush would stick to the blade, and quickly become too heavy for what little grip my wheels could accomplish. I figured I could make a bigger mess of things than we already had, and get the tractor stuck, to boot.

Now the driveway is one solid block of ice. Either I will get lucky, and it will slough off in big chunks when the next warm up occurs, or we are stuck skating our vehicles up and down the drive for the next few weeks. Either way, any small cracks that existed before, are now being stressed, big time.

Water flows and seeps into every crack and crevass, then it expands with destructive power when it freezes. It’s how we accomplish some of our world class pot holes in the roads around here. I can’t wait to see how the driveway looks, come spring.

The colder it gets, the harder the freeze. The harder the freeze, the more dramatic the breaking. When ice expands, it makes a lot of noise. The bigger the ice, the bigger the noise the cracking ice makes. Standing on a frozen lake, when the ice ruptures, the boom of fracturing ice can be very disquieting. When a mass of ice on top of the roof cracks, it is downright upsetting. Of course, it tends to happen in the darkest, coldest hours of the night, which just so happens to coincide with the time a person is trying to get a restful night’s sleep.

Quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me to be startled awake by, (((BOOM!))). Sleep tight.

Cyndie snapped a shot of me as I was about to enjoy trying to navigate the driveway disaster, walking the trash down to the road last night, with the windchill at 21 below.