It was frozen. Frozen solid. I had never seen a water bed that had frozen like a giant ice cube before.
I rolled over and felt the sharp jagged ice pressing up from inside the bed, jabbing into my side. I was dressed in long insulated underwear – long johns, we called them – and wearing a heavy coat with a Wolverine fur collar. It was the winter of 1975 in Minnesota, and I could hear the wind howl and scream outside the windows of the trailer.