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YaktraxJanuary 16, 2011 "The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor . . ." So wrote Alfred Noyes in "The Highwayman," and so sang Phil Ochs and Loreena McKennitt in their settings of the poem, with minor tweaks to fit the words to the music. Replace moonlight with ice and purple moor with leafless oaks and you'll have an idea of what my road looks like. Halcyon Way is a ribbon of ice weaving through the trees. Pine Hill, the back way to the town dump and State Road, isn't much better. Thanks to Pine Hill's ruts and bumps, the ice is pocked in places, meaning a person's boots or a dog's paws can get a little purchase on it. Every dirt road and driveway I've been down in the last few days looks similar. A friend who's unsteady on her feet tells of getting into her car on her glare-ice driveway and then realizing that the windshield wipers were sticking straight out, perpendicular to the glass. (This is common storm prep in these parts: if the wipers are sticking out, they won't be buried under snow or frozen fast to the windshield.) Rather than get out of her car and risk a fall, she drove out to the nearest paved, plowed, and sanded road, pulled over, and laid the wipers down. On most terrain, I'm very steady on my feet, but half a mile of glare ice? Wearing my winter boots I could probably make it from one end to the other without bruising or breaking anything, but it would take most of an hour. Holding Travvy's leash in one hand would not improve my odds. But Travvy and I are out every morning, covering ground at a close-to-normal clip. He slips more than I do. The secret? Yaktrax. Talk about indispensable! No ad campaign was necessary to sell me on Yaktrax. All I had to do was pull them onto my boots and go walking on the ice. To spare you an extra thousand effusive words, here's a picture:
This is my brand-new pair. The old ones were day-glo green, but they didn't have that strap over the instep. Occasionally they'd snag on underbrush or a fallen branch and pop off without my noticing. When I retraced my steps, the bright green was easy to spot against the snow. The rubber that holds the treads in place is very strong, but though the small size is supposed to be right for a ladies' size 10 shoe, which is what I wear, these particular boots have oversize feet and I think they overtaxed my Yaktrax. When a piece holding the tread in place broke last week on one -- what? Yaktrack?, I went looking for Yaktrax on Martha's Vineyard. No luck. So I ordered a new pair from Duluth Trading, the "Pro" model with the strap, size medium. Then the other one snapped along the perimeter of the sole, meaning it no longer stayed on my boot. I walked around one-Yaktracked for a couple of days, haunting the post office for my parcel from Minnesota. Daytime temperatures in the mid-30s melted the surface of the ice, evening temps down into the teens froze it again. The ice, in other words, got slicker and smoother. Yesterday morning, en route to Rally practice, I stopped by the post office. No package, and -- Monday being a holiday -- no mail until Tuesday. At practice my missing Yaktrack was noticed -- and Karen said Brickman's carried them. After practice, I drove immediately into Vineyard Haven, found a parking place on Spring Street, and walked down to Main. Yep, Brickman's had them all right. That's where the pair in the photo came from. I could return the mail-order pair when it arrives, but I won't. Even if you only wear one pair of boots at a time, you can't have too many Yaktrax.
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