Stay safe… like a penguin

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2019 (2682 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you notice me waddling through the frozen food aisle at the grocery store with my body hunched over and my feet spread apart, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.

I am simply doing the No. 1 thing medical experts recommend for surviving extremely icy conditions, by which I mean walking like a penguin.

You probably think I’m kidding around for comical effect, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The sad fact is I am going to be walking like a penguin for the immediate future because I have no desire to experience a sudden, painful, icy death.

I have been fretting over the threat of imminent death for about a week, because the sun has been melting the snow on the roof of my house, causing it to puddle on our front and back steps, where it is transformed into miniature skating rinks when the temperature dips.

So there I was last week, barbecuing up a storm in my snow-covered backyard for my wife’s birthday, when I foolishly decided to go inside and fetch more meat to toss on the grill.

As I walked up the steps, toting a barbecue spatula and tongs, I thought to myself, “Gee, that looks really icy,” which is when — WHOOSH! — my legs flew out from under me and I plummeted onto the top of the ice-coated steps.

Fortunately, I knew what to do. I lay there moaning like a wounded woodland creature to alert my wife that she should come and rescue me.

“Waaaaaaaah!” is what I wailed after the breath returned to my bruised body.

Which is when my wife poked her nose out through the back door. “What are you doing?” She Who Must Not Be Named asked as I stared up in the direction of her nostrils.

“Barbecuing is hard work,” I replied, “so I thought I’d take a little nap on the back steps.”

Other than wounded pride, I was just fine. But apparently I didn’t learn a valuable lesson about the relationship between ice and steps, because on Monday morning, when I left the house to go to work, I foolishly put one foot on our front steps and — “WhooshOhMy-GawdNotAgainPlease!”

Had you been there, you would have seen a 300-pound newspaper columnist flipping in the air, screeching in abject terror, then crash-landing flat on his back on concrete steps covered with enough ice to freeze a woolly mammoth.

Had it not been for the fact I was wearing the backpack containing my office computer, which cushioned the blow, I would not be writing these words right now because I slammed into the steps with enough force to crush a barnyard animal.

I was, in a word, stunned. I lay there for several minutes, whimpering, until I remembered what to do. “HONEY!” I shrieked for my wife, who was about 30 feet away inside the house, tapping away on the home computer.

No matter how loudly I whined and moaned, she couldn’t hear me, and the dogs, whose job it is to bark at invisible objects outside our picture window, were oblivious to my agony, too.

You are going to be incredibly impressed with the amount of pluck I displayed (we newspaper columnists are blessed with a great deal of pluck), because, on my own, I managed to roll over, push myself up on my knees, and slowly crawl back up the stairs onto our porch.

“I could have been killed, honey!” I calmly yelled when I got back inside. In response, my wife looked me over, rolled her eyeballs, then got up and spread some of that ice-melting mixture on the steps and installed a tiny plastic child’s chair as a sort of temporary roadblock to protect the mailman.

What I did next took an even greater deal of courage. Despite having a badly bruised right hand that was turning the same colour as a mature eggplant, I sat down at the computer and typed in the words “slipping on ice.”

Which is when I discovered dozens and dozens of breathless news reports in which a wide variety of health professionals, insurance firms and even Alberta Health Services stated categorically that the best way to avoid slipping on the ice is to emulate the humble, squat penguin.

“Walk like a penguin to avoid slipping on ice, German doctors advise,” squawked the headline on a story in the staid British newspaper the Guardian, which almost never jokes about things like this.

These news stories pointed to two basic scientific facts: 1) Like Canadians, penguins spend most of their time living in icy conditions; and 2) You almost never see a penguin fall down, unless they are being chased by documentary filmmakers.

“Does it look silly to waddle down the street? Absolutely. But give it a shot — penguins, after all, have a decent amount of experience holding their own on ice and might have a thing or two to teach us,” claimed an article on Vox.com that was accompanied by a graphic featuring some incredibly cute — and remarkably stable — penguins.

“The keys to the penguin walk are simple: extend your arms (er, wings) out to your side, bend your knees and shuffle side to side as you move forward (rather than taking big steps). All of this will help maintain your centre of gravity in a treacherous climate — the type of environment that penguins have existed in for centuries.”

Remember to walk flat-footed with your feet pointed slightly out like a penguin, concentrate on keeping your balance, go S-L-O-W-L-Y and everything should be just ducky, if you don’t mind mixing your bird metaphors.

So that’s what me and my battered body will be doing until the ice is gone sometime in August. Wherever we go, I am shuffling from side to side with my arms akimbo, pretending I am the world’s largest, most accident-prone penguin.

They laughed at my ungainly gait in the liquor store, but I’m fine with that, because we’ll see who ends up on the rocks.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca