Black ice often forms at night, when the dew point is near freezing and the cold pavement turns moisture to ice. If you take an ice cube from the tray and look at the bottommost layer, it will be clear.
Black ice means any thin, clear coating of ice, without the trapped air bubbles that render thicker ice cloudy. The ice isn’t actually black (Key and Peele do a funny bit on the racializing of this particularly sinister hazard) it only looks that way on asphalt. Northerners know to fear black ice, but its deadly nature is not widely understood by people from more temperate regions, and figurative language doesn’t help. The first black-ice warning was on a highway message board just inside the Vermont border. I recalled a haunting line of Emily Dickinson’s from some long-ago college course: “A chilly Peace infests the Grass.” I saw a car spun out in the median near Greenfield. An icy fog clung to the sides of the highway in the swampy area around Amherst. The freezing rain started in Massachusetts, just north of Holyoke. “Early Christmas present,” I said, tossing it over the seat as I jumped into the truck and started off again.Īt Hartford, we changed to Interstate 91. I looked appalled-candy at this hour?-but bought her a bag anyway.
I was glad to be in a four-wheel-drive truck-a Ford F-150, one of America’s most popular vehicles-which usually stayed on the farm in Vermont.Īs I was going inside for the washroom key, Rose asked for Skittles. It was raining lightly, and was noticeably colder than in Brooklyn. We waited until after New Haven to stop for a drive-through breakfast, because the Berlin, Connecticut, exit has a McDonald’s next to it, along with a Mobil station where I went afterward to fill the tank. But Rose, watching “ Moana” with headphones on, couldn’t hear me.īluetoothlessly, I d.j.’d with my iPhone, which Lisa, when riding shotgun, ordinarily prohibits for safety reasons. “Outstanding, Private!” I said, glancing in the rearview.
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