It's okay, I wanted a new teakettle anyway

Fish waste produces gasses that are toxic to the fish if they're allowed to build up. Therefore it's important, when one has a pond stocked with fish, to keep a hole in the ice so that the gasses trapped underneath have a way to escape. Not being a fan of having to haul my butt outside in the dead of winter, I bought a nifty little de-icer gadget, a 1-foot circular heater that plugs into an electrical socket and keeps a hole melted in the ice. It's designed to float, so normal snow and ice aren't a big deal-- the heater will just float up the extra little bit.

This system goes all to hell when the heater gets a lot of wet, heavy snow dumped on top of it while it has no electricity with which to make heat, such as when there's a 2-day power outage. I ended up with a heater trapped under 2 inches of ice. As a stop-gap measure, I'd boiled water in the teapot and hauled it outside to pour on top of the pond. It created enough of a hole to suffice for not-killing-fish purposes, but it's not self-maintaining, and I don't want to spend the entire winter hauling teakettles full of boiling water out to the pond. So, I started looking for other options.

Chopping the ice is a bad idea to begin with, since it can send shock waves through the ice that can also kill the fish. Plus, I was afraid that I'd harm the de-icer or the cord for the de-icer. I hit upon the idea of using our propane torch, a large candy-cane-shaped piece of metal designed to burn weeds and/or melt ice from sidewalks.

Early indications were that the process was working, but really really slowly. Unfortunately, standing at the edge of the pond and leaning over to get the business end of the torch near the ice surrounding the little heater put my back in a very stressful position, and it wasn't long before I started to ache. By that point, though, I had melted enough of the top layer of snow to see just how much ice was underneath, and I was confident that it was strong enough to walk on. So, I picked my way around the edge of the pond to a convenient entry point in the completely-frozen stream, and carefully made my way out to the center where the de-icer was buried. I was out there for a good 45 minutes, torching the ice around the de-icer while making sure to keep all the heat and melty bits in front of me so that the ice I was standing on would stay solid.

I started running into problems after a while, though. The water that had already been melted started to act as an insulator, taking a lot of the torch's heat and spreading it thinly across the top of a larger area than I wanted, which allowed a lot of the heat to dissipate back into the air instead of down further into the ice. I couldn't get enough depth with the heater to get all the way through the ice and down to the water. Eventually, I ran out of propane and just started whacking the end of the torch (it's pretty sturdy metal) into the area I had melted. It wasn't ideal, but I did manage to get a decently sized hole in the ice. Unfortunately, it was only about half as large as I needed to get the de-icer all the way up, and the rest of the ice was still too solid to whack into bits.

Eventually, I decided to try more boiling water, in the hopes that I could loosen more ice from the edges. Alas, it was not to be. I realized that I was going to need to do something about the water on top of the ice, or it would just re-freeze and I'd have to start from scratch. I hit upon the brilliant idea of dunking the empty teakettle into the hole I had created, then walking over to the edge of the pond and pouring the water out. There's enough of a slope to let the water drain away, at least until it freezes.

Remember how I was very careful with the torch to keep the heat in front of me? The edge of the pond that slopes away was also in front of me, and though the snow on top was not melted at all, the water underneath the ice had warmed enough to start melting ice from the bottom. That's my theory, anyway. All I really know is that I was pouring the kettle over the edge of the pond and all of a sudden the ice under me let go and my left leg was cold and wet and significantly further down that it was the moment before. Also, I wrenched my right knee a bit, and the teakettle slammed into the rocks at the edge of the pond and the handle broke. I screamed on the way down, yelled for help as I scrambled back out of the water and onto terra firma. I realized that with the new windows doing a much better job of sealing the house, no one was going to hear me, and pulled myself together enough to hightail it into the house, dropping the teakettle and then my coat as soon as I hit the front door. Boots came off as I yelled for help again, and CJ kindly started up the shower so the water could warm up while I hobbled my way up the stairs, scared and cold and wet and did I mention scared?

My jeans were stiff and I couldn't feel my leg, so I got into the shower half-dressed and ran the warmish water over my jeans until I was confident that I could pull them off without taking skin along too. Then it was a warm shower followed immediately by a warm bath, inching the heat up slowly. Oh, and some crying and sobbing because let me tell you, that shit is terrifying and produces quite a lot of adrenaline that needs to be bled off somehow.

There does not appear to be any permanent damage. The skin is neither over- nor under-sensitive, there are no weird colors except for a new bruise where I hit something (possibly the edge of the ice) on my way down. Toes and ankles and knees flex as well as they did this morning. It's the same leg that had tingling and loss of feeling from the herniated disc, so I can't say that it feels perfect-- there's still tingling and a little bit of loss of feeling, but no worse than yesterday.

But I need a new teakettle.