P-p-practice

The mercury is pushing 70 today, and some people are actually walking around in shirtsleeves. A typical midwinter Washington heat wave.

(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)

Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:

A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:

I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.

But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
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*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.