I’d just gotten my cheese dip container balanced on my knee for a well-earned televised winter games treat.

My remote control was tightly attached to my right hand by a thick rubber band so I wouldn’t lose it during brief naps. The furnace was turned up to snub the blowing snow scratching at our front door.

I was ready.

Then the house Torch Bearer appeared, waving a smoldering, long-handled spatula over her head and announcing that our own winter games were about to begin.

It was time, the little wife with the big spatula said, to go outside and show my winter prowess on our roof sewer vent and on the glacial ice spilling over our eave troughs.

So, with no trumpets blaring, Team Stubble Mulch out here on the frozen tundra reluctantly overshoed-up for the annual Sewer Vent and Overhanging Ice Whack Olympics.

I’m not a big fan of winter games. It’s been only recently that a good luge race would be featured on television, and that’s about as exciting as watching haircuts down at Razor’s Edge.

I think I have ice on my roof overhang that pre-dates the advent of television of luge races.

So I left the cat in charge of my chip dip and headed for the roof dressed in the official uniform. I also had a small ax tucked into my belt, a crowbar on a strong lanyard around my neck and a wood chisel tucked in my pocket.

Tatters from my wife’s old panty hose were tied around my pant legs at the ankles to keep the snow out of my socks, and I wore my best Elmer Fudd ear-flap hat. I took along our son’s plastic goggles from his high school chemistry class.

I had undergone the transition from couch potato to a well-muscled, alert, perfectly conditioned Ice Whack athlete, 30 feet in the air on an old, slippery aluminum ladder slightly bent from an summer-time confrontation with the garbage truck.

At the sound of an imagined gun I started chipping away. Neatness in ice whacking doesn’t count. Points are awarded for speed and the tonnage of ice chipped. Points are deducted for shingle nicks and missing fingers.

I had one leg on a ladder rung and the other slung over the glacier of ice cascading down off the roof. One arm was wrapped around the steam-spewing sewer vent, and the other guided the ax sharply as it bit into centuries-old ice that had built up since the last Ice Age.

My ax hit the ice with solid whacks. It calved into bread loaf sizes and fell noisily onto my air conditioner below. Pieces of frozen ox flesh and fur flew into my face and on to my goggles. Strange looking bugs were freed from what had been their tomb for millions of years. An ancient fern leaf kicked up out of the ice and hit me on the cheek.

I freed a migrating mallard duck that had stopped to rest weeks before and become mired in what had been roof slush.

It was all darn hard work. I finished in time for the TV luge race.  

Watching those guys on sleds careening down the mountain on their backs, feet first, I came to realize that I wasn’t the only bimbo in the box.

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