An author who warmed to her subject by Rebecca Wigod

While doing the research for her book, Ice, Pauline Couture
checked into the famous Ice Hotel near Quebec City and had the best night's
sleep of her life. The air felt fresh, as if no one had ever breathed it before.

Couture has lived, breathed, eaten and slept ice since deciding three years
ago to write a "one-word-title" book on frozen water. Now Ice is out, its
subtitle hinting at the scope of the topic: Beauty, Danger, History.

Couture, who lives in Toronto, is a bilingual former journalist who worked
for major Canadian newspapers and CBC Radio before starting her own communications company. For the last dozen years, she has put together complex policy documents for corporate clients, "holding the pen," as she puts it, "for teams of 30 people, [including] economists, investment bankers and engineers."

Touring the country with Ice (McArthur & Company, 356 pages), Couture says
she takes a certain amount of "macho satisfaction" from being able to "absorb
vast amounts of information quickly, process it, analyse it, synthesize it and keep a rolling draft going, with people criticizing it."

The Toronto literary agent Bruce Westwood, recognizing that she has these
skills, encouraged her to write a non-fiction book, like Mark Kurlansky's Salt, that digs deeply into an everyday subject, unearthing all manner of interesting facts. She says he told her that "readers know what they're getting when they buy one of those books, and booksellers know what they're selling."

She brainstormed possible topics as she and her husband, Ian Morrison (the
spokesman for the group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting), sat in a red
convertible with the top down, driving up the Icefields Parkway, north of Lake Louise, Alta.

"I had a notebook on my lap and was writing down possible book topics .... I
looked up and saw the Crowfoot Glacier. It's shaped like a huge bird's foot,
curled around a huge rock face.

"I remember that it [used to have] three talons, three toes, but there are
only two left. One's melted away.

"It just started me thinking about ice, the importance of ice as the power
that carved the landscape we see around us. As the receptacle for 750,000 years that you can analyse through ice cores, like tree rings, year by year. As the bank for the world's fresh water ... but also the beauty of it, the mystique of it, and how we never think of it.

"It was the ideal topic. When Bruce saw the list, he said: 'That's the one.
Nobody's done that. Let's do it.' "

Ice is not as beautifully designed and produced as Ross Laird's books on wood
and stone, but it is undeniably full of thought-provoking facts. For example:
"Ice cores from deep in the heart of the Greenland ice sheet show evidence of
the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1886 and the use of lead in Roman foundries." And this, on the role of ice in treating injuries: "Western medicine believes firmly in its usefulness, whereas Chinese medicine mostly rejects it."

Couture says that with a book like this, "ideally, you're taking readers by
the hand on a journey they don't have the time, or possibly the skills, to do
for themselves."

"Delight is big with me," she says. And, explaining this seeming non
sequitur, she adds: People are tired, people are overloaded. If you're going to bring them something that's informative and educational, it had better damned well be delightful."

A former radio talk-show host, she's now enjoying being the kind of guest who
is invited to stay beyond her allotted time because the phone lines are going
crazy.

The reaction to Ice, she says, has been "absolutely amazing .... When people
start to think about it, they're very curious about ice. The other thing I find is that people are dying to tell their ice stories."

© The Vancouver Sun