Ice Follies Encounters With Icy Patches Are A Rite Of Winter. Here, Readers Freeze Frame Their Moments Of Slip-Sliding Away.

Bob Wood was helping an extremely large elderly woman cross a street in Coeur d’Alene earlier this winter when he stepped on a frozen patch and went down hard.

The woman then fell directly on top of him, losing her artificial leg in the process.

“You almost had to see it to believe it,” said Wood, who is 70.

A couple of weeks ago, The Slice asked Inland Northwesterners for their best “I slipped on an icy spot and went down like I’d been shot with a deer rifle” stories. And Wood was among the 40 or so gravity-tested readers who responded.

L.M. Johnson was another. “Just after Christmas and almost nine months pregnant, I went shopping with my mother in Butte, Mont. We parked alongside the sidewalk, and while squeezing between the car and snowbank to help my young son out of the back seat, I slipped. Suddenly there I was, lying flat under the car with my head in the snowbank and unable to move because my tummy was wedged tightly under the car. A kind rescue came with two passing gentlemen who gently pulled and tugged until they could lift me up and out onto the sidewalk, unhurt but slightly abashed.”

Kathy Reugh wrote: “My husband and I were taking a nice Sunday morning stroll. The snow was falling, and we had just stopped to buy a latte. One minute I was walking, the next thing I knew I had slipped on some snow-covered ice and was lying flat on my back. My husband helped me up and we determined I was unhurt. I even recovered some of my latte. But when I looked up at my husband, he was drenched with my drink. It was even dripping out of his ear. Apparently it had gone flying as I fell and he was the target.”

John Kuhlmann recalled a spill - observed by “all my fellow fifthgraders” - that cracked the plaster cast that had just been put on his leg after a skiing accident.

Velva Myers wrote: “I approached my larger than normal mailbox piled with snow around it, wearing street shoes. I grabbed the box under my arm to balance as I climbed the pile of snow to peek into the box. Suddenly I slipped, taking the large mailbox under my arm with me as I shot across the street on my back.”

It could have been worse.

“I was out in our field feeding the cattle,” faxed Mich Somday of Malo, Wash. “I was trying to yank a hay bale out of the back of the pickup using a hay hook. My feet started to slip, the hay hook came out of the bale and I fell butt-first into a still steaming pile of cow poop.”

Elsie Kennedy’s memorable mishap occurred on a long, inclined driveway. “First I started to slide then fell down on hands and knees which imbedded gravel into my palms which started to bleed,” she wrote.

Nancy Hough had it worse. “I was walking very carefully to my car after work (at a local high school) when my feet literally flew out from underneath me and I went down hard and fast, landing on my hip,” she wrote. “I fractured my pelvis in several places - and I had to lie on the icy parking lot for nearly an hour because the ambulance got stuck in a ditch on the way to my school.”

Mead’s Jane Floyd recalled a year that started off in a decidedly inauspicious manner. “On January 1, 1985, about 9 a.m. on a sunny subzero morning, I started the new year with a double back flip off an icy patch on our front porch,” she faxed.

It netted her a compression fracture in her back.

Shirley Mayo of Bonners Ferry told of a time she went out to get the paper wearing snow boots and a nightgown. She wiped out and slid so far that her gown wound up around her neck. “Boy was that cold,” she wrote. “Hope no one was driving by.”

Larry Hanley slipped on a patch of ice covered with several inches of water and hit the side of his head so hard it punctured an eardrum.

Cheney’s Rob Diebold remembered a time in Walla Walla when he hit a stretch of ice and, as he put it, “Did the splits like a ballerina.”

Rathdrum’s Connie Literal was laughing at her friend who had fallen when she herself went down, spraining her wrist in the process.

S. Emagene Warren wrote: “During my walk through Shadle mall, I slipped and made an almost perfect three-point landing on my hand, knee, and rear. In a rattled state, I was slowly assessing the damage when Santa Claus emerged from the store in front of me asking how he could help.”

Sharla Pace of St. Maries, Idaho, remembered back 20 years when she was living in Spokane’s Browne’s Addition and attending secretarial school. She routinely wore a pair of slick-bottomed dress boots and fell on the ice so often that neighbors began to regard watching her as notto-be-missed entertainment.

Chewelah’s Terri Price was trying to get into her car after church when her feet slipped and under the car she went.

Coeur d’Alene’s L. Whiteley was living in Denver when she was running to catch a bus, lost her footing on the ice and “fell squarely on my behind with everyone watching.”

Dustin Dyer of Wauconda, Wash., wrote: “I am 15 years old and slide on the ice at school often. One time, I went to slide across some ice on my way to lunch when I slipped and fell on my butt really hard. The part that is embarrassing is that my butt was all wet and I had to go through the rest of school looking like I wet my pants.”

“I had a pail of milk in each hand that I was taking to our two calves,” wrote Marguerite Nachtwey. “I stepped over into the snow to miss the ice but I soon found out there was ice there, too. And I went down kerplunk. One pail of milk spilled all over me.”

Tacey Larson was on her way to a wedding when her toddler daughter made a mad dash for freedom. Larson instinctively turned to pursue her. “And in the next second I was on my butt with my feet in the air.”

Two other women told of crashing to earth but still managing to save, in one case, a casserole dish, and, in another, a cigarette.

Another reader described a time when she fell down a set of slippery stairs, her backside counting all seven steps.

One woman described trying to help up a fallen friend by pulling on her coat collar - and, accidentally, all but choking her.

And then there was the guy who was making meaningful eye contact with a woman in a parking lot when the mood was ruined by him losing his footing Three Stooges-style and winding up beneath his truck.

Others just talked about how much they bled.

But Kathy Berrigan of Kettle Falls might have offered the best description of how it’s a person’s dignity that sometimes takes the worst bruising.

“Grasping my shopping list, I stepped out of the car onto the ice. Before you could say, ‘Hand me a wrench,’ I was flat on my back under the car staring up at the undercarriage. “

“I checked for missing body parts, scattered purse contents and snickering onlookers. Finding none, I slid myself back into the daylight and tried to look calm in spite of muddy water running down my pant legs into my shoes.”