The Coming Ice Age

It does not help that it is forming at the edge of my driveway. (This is where I must deposit the layers that endeavor to form before my two car garage.) The twenty by thirty foot cement pad requires heavy labor just to remove a few inches of accumulation.

Every day I am confronted with my glacial pile. It is beginning to threaten the back porch and a few grape vines that I planted near it. But the oppression exuding from this monstrosity is not so much physical as it is psychological. (I wanted to say metaphysical as it seems to transcend the usual earthly experience.) The ominous, ungainly, ghastly and voluminous pile is creeping into the dark corners of my brain, (those corners where my hypochondria and sixth sense dwell). This hill, this crest, this glacier seems to whisper to me every time I pass, "I am just the beginning." And then, when I inadvertently walk near while taking out the trash, "ICE AGE!"

So there it is. I have heard all the arguments about global warming, but they don't amount to much when your thermometer seems to be stuck at 15 degrees Fahrenheit (you will have to do your own conversion to Centigrade). Scientists speculating on the matter are not in agreement on the subject, but four out of five dentists surveyed, say the Earth is warming, while satellites tell us it isn't, and articles in magazines are telling us it might not be, or maybe could be, and even if it isn't we should act as though it is. Frankly, especially at this time of year, I can warm to the global warming idea. It might make the Michigan winter weather a bit more bearable.

It's the picture of another Ice Age that leaves me cold. The glaciers of the last ice age did not just form in the north and amble their way southward, scraping the earth as they went. No, indeedy, they were the product of layers of snow that carpeted huge areas and then neglected to melt off in the spring. They stuck around through summer and greeted another winter on the other side of the cycle of seasons.

That is why I find this elephantine drift forming in my yard so disturbing. I can imagine it get-ting so great that it will not be melted even by the dog days of August. And the next year, it could get even bigger. I can see myself with a propane torch melting it off before it can crush the sides of my house. The mountains will eventually form on all sides of my humble abode. I will be in a little valley. I will have to bail the melted snow a bucket at a time over the walls of ice forming outside my little piece of property.

Yet this would not be the end of it for as the walls of ice grow higher and higher, there is nothing to keep them from arching over my roof and closing me in completely. I will be like the narwhals that occasionally get surrounded by ice in the arctic. Their air-hole gets smaller and smaller, the narwhals pierce the ice with their unicorn spears, but all their efforts are naught against the bitter, unrelenting cold. Finally, at last, in spite of all their efforts their last access to air freezes over. They drown.

Only I won't drown, I will simply be cut off from the rest of humanity. The paper boy, an in-dustrious lad, will have tunnels through the ice sheets, but he will be unable to maintain them amidst the shifting glaciers. Eventually, I will no longer receive the daily paper wrapped as it usually comes in its own little plastic bag. The mail lady will succumb as well. The post office motto of delivery despite wind, snow, sleet or hail pointedly does not include glacial drift. Worse still, my wife won't be able to get the car out of the garage to make her weekly trip on Wednesdays to the shopping metropolis of Michigan's Thumb (I am referring to Bad Axe, of course). Thank goodness for cell-phones at least we will be able to call friends and relatives on birthdays and holidays, that is until the ice sheet over the house becomes so thick that not even a satellite will be able to expedite communication.

This will mark the end of civilization as we know it. So don't complain to me about global warming in the cold, dark winter. It only prompts me to drop an elbow on the table, place my chin in my hands and think, "Ah, if only..."