My hairiest encounter with ice was when I was in college. I was riding a squirrely racing bike with a rack on the back and my book bag strapped to the rack. I reached a pinch-point in the road, going under an overpass with a bike-tire-eating sewer grate. I had to move to the left to avoid the grate, but there was a bus coming up from behind, and suddenly, I hit ice. My rear end fishtailed, and I thought, OK, now I'm going to die, because the bus was right behind me. Somehow I stayed up and lived to tell this tale. I will never know how.