ABSTRACT
One evening early in January 2005, I got stuck pulling off the road to visit our family’s cottage in Warren, Maine. The cottage sits just above North Pond (which is really a lake-the nomenclature is a New England idiosyncrasy). The garage and the road, near which I was stuck, are on the slope above the cottage. The foot of snow left over from late December was thickly crusted with ice, and the tracks I had pulled into were slick. When the front of the car lost traction, the back was not entirely off the road. I have lived in New England for a long time; I should have known better than to pull into previously owned tracks in snow, as they are the rst spots to ice over. I also did not ask myself who had made tracks in the snow in the eld above my cottage. Standing outside the car, pretending to try to gure out how to get the car off the road, I saw that there were ice shermen on the pond.
