One October, my wife and I spent a vacation on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. We were eager to visit the rain forests near the coast, but we heard that snow slides had made some of the roads impassable. Although apprehensive about the conditions we might run into, we drove on.

Sure enough, we had gone only a short way up the High Rain Forest road when we saw a sign: "Ice 10 miles."

Five miles farther on, there was another sign: "Ice 5 miles."

The next one was, "Ice 1/2 mile."

We practically crept that half-mile.

When we came to the last sign it was outside a small grocery, and it read, "Ice 75 cents."