Published: March 28, 2007 09:49 am      

Of ice and Canadians

We try to keep up with news from other areas here at the News-Capital.

That, of course, involves reading lots of different newspapers online. Last Thursday, Editor Matt Lane read us an opinion piece that was in the Buffalo (New York) News.

The piece, under the heading of “View from Canada” was by Dan Lawson, a Canadian, who doesn’t understand Americans’ attachment to ice in our drinks. Yes, we Americans like an ice cold soft drink. A lot of us like ice in our tea and there are people who like iced coffee. But, we seem to be a minority (in that respect) when it comes to other countries. People who have visited foreign countries have told me they had a hard time finding ice for their drinks. So, that’s obviously something we like in America and others could care less about. I was fine with Lawson’s viewpoint until we read the part where he questioned why the victims of Hurricane Katrina wanted ice since it was hot and they didn’t have food or water. Excuse me — you can put a piece of ice in your mouth, it melts and you have water. Well, duh. He is from Canada and I guess it really doesn’t get that hot up there. I’ll forgive him for his lack of knowledge in this case. But, it got worse. He talks about the ice storm we experienced in January. He says (and I quote) “Again, the issue came up during the ice storms that hit the sensible Midwest this winter. I noticed this bit from a news article: “No place in Oklahoma has been harder hit than McAlester. At the E-Z Mart, store manager Becky Clayton was selling out of bags of ice, soda, water and potato chips. Poor Becky. Running out of ice during an ice storm. I thought to myself: Just go outside and shake the trees, for heaven’s sake. But that didn’t seem to register in Oklahoma, where the four food groups appear to be water, Coke, chips and ice.” Now that really got my ire. This guy’s from Canada for crying out loud. Surely he’s been through an ice storm. He has to know that common sense tells you in the first place do not shake a tree laden with ice. It’s likely to hurt you, if not kill you. In the second place, the frozen water fell from the sky. You don’t know what kind of pollutants might be in it. I would drink it if I could boil it but I (and many others) didn’t have any way to do that. Frankly, I heat and cook using electricity at home. I have a gas hot water heater so I did have warm water. But, I had no lights, no heat. It got really cold inside my house, really cold.

And, Mr. Lawson, I would have been extremely glad to have had a bag of potato chips. Personally, I lost four pounds during the week I didn’t have electricity at home. I was lucky to have one hot meal a day during that week. There were two days I didn’t have a hot meal. I was very grateful I worked for the newspaper which was being powered by a generator and I had a warm place to go. I was grateful our publisher fed us doughnuts in the morning and made sure we had a hot meal at noon for two days.

I hope Mr. Lawson never has to endure what we did during the Christmas Day ice storm in 2000 much less the one we just survived in January.

But if he ever does, he might have a little more sympathy. Read his column for yourself: http://www.buffalonews.com/149/story/37649.html

Contact Teresa Atkerson at family@mcalesternews.com