Winter's so scary, you don't want to get caught up in it.(Chicago Tribune)

CHICAGO _ Not long ago, a 10-year-old California girl who has never seen snow asked me, "So what's winter like where it snows?" The first word that came to mind was "dangerous." Other words could apply. Beautiful. Cold. White. Sloppy. Slippery. Fun. Inconvenient. Hard. But the word that suits most of all is dangerous.

"What do you mean?" said this girl, who could hardly imagine life beyond the land of perpetual springtime. She listened wide-eyed as I told her about the recent taxi ride I'd taken to O'Hare Airport, and how the expressway was backed up for miles because _ not for the first time this winter _ a car had skidded on the icy pavement, vaulted up the hard snow on the median barrier and landed on the "L" tracks.

She gasped and shook her head, as if I were describing the unfathomable perils of somewhere deeply foreign, like the Arctic or the Amazon.

"Not really?"

"Yes," I said, "people die from winter in Chicago."

We were reminded of winter's treacheries again last week by the crash of a Salvation Army van headed downstate to deliver its passengers to visit relatives in prison. Ten people died. Bad driving was apparently not to blame. Bad brakes weren't the problem either. No, the cause was not the usual driver error or mechanical fault.

The culprit, it seems, was ice on the road, abetted by a wind so strong it could bully a big machine. In other words, the killer was winter. And too often in the annual life-or-death contest of people vs. winter, winter wins.