Driving down rural Highway 64 Thursday I saw something very unusual for this part of the world: a pond iced over; completely covered with a thin sheet of ice.

While North America creaks in the throes of a cold snap rare in its intensity, sights like a frozen pond in North Carolina take me back to my childhood in Wisconsin. Ice on the farm pond on Highway 64 might have been thick enough to keep a bird from getting a drink of water, but it would never have supported me on skates with a hockey stick.

Every culture has rites of passage and one of them for me was opening my first pair of ice skates on a Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to slip on my coat and boots, slosh through the snow, slide under the fence and slog over to the wide spot in the creek to teach myself to skate. How hard could it be?

My parents stayed in the warm house and simply urged me to be sure the ice was thick enough to support me and my sisters. Well, how thick is safe? How do I find out how thick it is? 

We took a trusty ax, chopped a hole near the edge and deemed it safe. After a few tentative steps toward the middle, then jumping up and down on it without falling through, we were certain.

Winter can be hard for some than others as this picture from Canada shows. See photo gallery.

I discovered it is very difficult to stand up on ice skates. But I eventually learned and later we frequented a much larger pond. Some winters it would snow during the first deep freeze, leaving the surface crunchy and worthless for skating.

On good years Dennis, Jay and I would shovel off a large area, tie magazines around our shins to guard them from whacking and play some hockey. Usually we were so tired from shoveling that the eventual hockey game was short. When other kids found a snow cleared patch of pond, they quickly gathered to take advantage of our labors, much to our resentment.

If it was really cold, we could take the tractor onto the ice with a blade to clear our hockey rink. One winter our neighbor took us onto the pond in his car. We drove around totally out of control – but relatively safe – sliding effortless and quietly across the flat, clear ice. It took some wheel spinning to build a little momentum, but not much effort to maintain it. Soft reeds on the edge of the pond kept us from banging the car into stumps or trees, in case you were wondering!

In the winter of the really big freeze, it was far too cold to be outside for other than emergencies. My dad drove a fuel truck then for the local farmer’s cooperative. Of course, people were running out of heating fuel faster than anticipated and way ahead of schedule. So dad suffered through enormously long days in -50 degree wind chill.

I’m amazed his truck would start in the mornings, but he kept it sheltered between sheds. Still, the engine screeched and complained when asked to turn over. Lubrication hardened in the oil pan, so metal rubbed metal briefly, creating the ruckus.

Temperatures like that freeze your nose hairs and your breath crystallizes into icicles on your mustache and eyebrows. It’s literally too cold to snow.

But when it did snow we pulled out the chains and wrapped them around the tires if we had to go somewhere. Snowplows shoved snow off the roads, filling up ditches. When the ditches were full snow blowers tossed the snow over the top.

On rare winters with very heavy snow, blown snow would create walls in areas of heavy drifts so that you felt you were driving through a tunnel. Approaching intersections was very tricky.

Of course the snow is always deeper in memory; the temperatures always colder; circumstances always more dire. My dad said when he was young he worked for a dairyman, who was too poor to afford a milk bucket. So dad had to ferry milk from the barn to the dairy one handful at a time; uphill; both ways.

I suspect our children will recall the 2010 freeze to their children in a manner that will elicit admiration for their sheer ability to survive.