Skating On Thin Ice

It is ageless tragedy, so culturally embedded it has become a trite idiom for anything tempting cautionary bounds, “You’re skating on thin ice.” The Aberdeen Journal of February 9, 1803, reported an incident outside Glasgow, Scotland. “On Saturday a most melancholy accident happened in the neighborhood of Paisley. Two boys of about 14 years of age, the one named Ritchie, and the other Macallum, were playing at shinty on the ice, at that part of the Cart called the High Lin, when the ice gave way with them, and they fell in.”

Louisa May Alcott, in her iconic ‘Little Women’, described the all-too-frequent experience: “Keep near the shore; it isn’t safe in the middle…but something held and turned her round, just in time to see Amy throw up her hands and go down, with the sudden crash of rotten ice, the splash of water, and a cry that made Jo’s heart stand still with fear…”

“Started out,” Dennis Hebner recalled, “We used to play darts, me, Richie, my brother Robert, Vinnie Neville and another friend. We usually ended the game around eleven, and we decided to go down to George’s Place for a last drink and stayed there ‘til closing. I didn’t feel like stopping so I said to Vinnie – at the time Richie was already married and living up on New Pond – I said to Vinnie, I said ‘I got a case of Heineken down my cellar in the refrigerator, wanna come over and have a few beers?’

“This is like one-thirty now. So he comes up, and I think we almost knocked off the whole case of beer, the two of us. He left around, I don’t know, three o’clock? I’m not even sure. After he left, I was just wired. I was drunk. This is like three-thirty in the morning. And the day before I was up at Richie’s house skating cuz the ice was absolutely beautiful, like glass. So I said, ‘I’m gonna get my clothes on, get my sweatsuit on’ and I said, ‘I’m gonna go skating!’”

Hypothermia occurs as body temperature falls below 95 F. When body temperature drops, your heart, nervous system and other organs can't work normally. Left untreated, hypothermia can eventually lead to complete heart and respiratory failure and eventually death.

“I parked in Richie’s driveway, went down to his little dock and put my skates on, and I said ‘I’m gonna skate the perimeter of New Pond’. So I got behind Dr. Goodband’s house, he’s the one that saved me. I guess there were springs there, the ice didn’t freeze very thick, and I fell through. It was nine degrees that night, I remember that, and with that suit on underneath I was so waterlogged, but I got out, and I skated about ten feet and I fell in again. And that’s when I couldn’t get out, my clothes were so wet and the ice was so slippery I couldn’t get a grip on it to pull myself out. I kept saying ‘I’m not gonna die, I’m not gonna die,’ so I started screaming for help, and Dr. Goodband would sleep with his window open. He heard it, so next thing I knew the fire department and the police were there with a boat or something. I guess a couple of firemen fell in, and I remember kinda getting out of the water but then I kinda blacked out and don’t remember much till I woke up in the hospital.”

In water below 40 degrees, serious injury can result in minutes. Body fat, protective gear, and other factors influence how long someone can survive. At water temperature of 40 degrees, death may occur in 30-90 minutes. At water temperature of 32.5 degrees, death may occur in 15-45 minutes.

“My brother Brian was the first one there, I think he was working the fire station that night and I got there six-thirty or seven in the morning. I think I was in the water for forty-five minutes and it was cold, so anyone who says hypothermia sets in after ten minutes is full of it, cuz I lasted over a half hour!

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“So Brian came in and he sees my father coming down the hall and Brian runs out and says, ‘Okay, just don’t be too hard on Dennis’ and of course my father comes in, ‘What the hell were you doing at three-thirty in the morning!’ (laughs) The nurse comes in and she’s checking my vitals and all this stuff, because my body temperature was down to ninety-one, I think it was. And I told her the story and she said, ‘Good thing you were drinking so much, maybe that saved your life!’ I said ‘Honey, if I wasn’t drinking, I would’ve been in bed five hours earlier!’”

A cautionary tale whose elements of judgment need no emphasis. One of Norwood’s greatest athletes had survived anything but a trite idiom. He had literally skated on thin ice, crashed through its cautionary boundaries, and lives to tell the tale with typical irreverent Hebner humor.

“Tell me when the newspaper comes out,” Dennis said to me, “I’ll grab a bunch and give out autographed copies!”