Crampons: Security on Ice

Crampons. Sounds like a menstrual issue. Or something someone puts on your style. But no, crampons enhance my style. Or rather they enhance my well-being.

Crampons are metal spikes attached to a web of rubber you stretch over the bottom of your boots. My husband used to wear them years ago when he climbed mountains and trekked across glaciers. He strapped on the heavy-duty ones with mini-spears. I only needed the light kind.

We've had a couple of snowfalls, then rain turning the ground to slush and then freezing. Our driveway is now an expanse of treacherous granite-like grooves. I am obliged to cross them everytime I take Maggie, our Great Dane, out. She is always anxious and she pulls. Scary!

Still more scary is the dog park: a lethal ice-field of peaks and hollows, like waves frozen on a lake. No skating there. Only walking like a Geisha, taking tiny steps where no foot leaves the ground. I daily endure the fear of slipping and tripping and crashing down as dogs slide and collide around me.

I've had two falls on the ice. Once, I tripped over the leashes of my two poodles when I was concentrating on the beauty of Lake Michigan. That time I broke my left middle finger. Painful and a nuisance. Another time my heels went flying out from under me on a patch of black sidewalk ice and I badly bruised my tailbone. Sitting and walking hurt for weeks.

My most surprising injury happened, not on ice, but at the bottom of our basement stairs. When I stepped off I was expecting a floor to be there. It wasn't. It had caved-in. (We lived on the side of a mountain...a long story.) So I stepped out onto nothing and collapsed in the hole where the former floor had been. I broke the outside bones of my right foot. (Why do I say I broke? The lack of a basement floor broke...)

I was in a cast on crutches for weeks. That's not only incapacitating, it's discombobulating. I still had kids at home. I couldn't walk. I couldn't drive. Since I was fearful on stairs with my crutches, I went up and down them on my butt. To bathe, I had to hang my foot over the edge of the tub. Most frustrating of all, I couldn't carry things, like a basketful of laundry, (well, we no longer had a basement to do laundry in, in any case). I couldn't move a pot from one side of the kitchen to the other. I couldn't take a book from room to room , let alone a cup of coffee. I sure developed an empathy for the physically-challenged.

Which is all to say, I did not want to fall on the ice and break a bone or crack my skull. Hence, the crampons. They have revolutionized my life. They are like a "New Age" artifact. They make me feel more positive, they give me stability and balance and confidence, (things of which I'm often in short supply). I can't exactly say they make my spirits soar, but they certainly make them less insecure, less fearful. Ice be damned! I have conquered you. You are no longer an enemy, a cruel force to be avoided. You no longer have the power to emprison me, to hobble me, to do me harm. I have the courage of my footfall.

With crampons, I can go forth with gusto.