Bells, Clumsiness, Assistive Devices, Etc.

[DanielH]

I live in Colorado and don't have unusual gross motor skills issues. Like most people, I have trouble with ice, but not (once I got used to it) as much as a Bell on an ideal walking surface. I find it extremely difficult to imagine a Bell living here for more time than it takes to attend half of highschool, and obliged to go outside during the winter, not finding some assistive device. I expect Forks is worse. Does the Phaeton Bell just not walk outside much in winter? If the elementary and middle schools were each just one building, and she could regularly get rides to school and the library, it seems plausible that she wouldn't have had enough trouble to worry about it until highschool and wouldn't have come up with the wheelchair solution yet. I suppose it's also possible Forks is just that wheelchair inaccessible, but this also seems implausible.

[Marri]

Would Forks be worse than Colorado? The Pacific Northwest has pretty lovely weather in my experience; Seattle gets maybe a few inches of snow a year and doesn't usually drop below freezing.

[Alicorn]

I don't know very much about Forks's weather; I've been to Toronto and tried to move around in it in the winter. By stipulation Phaetonbell doesn't have a wheelchair but how bad an oversight this is depends on stuff. (They don't have socialized healthcare, which may have contributed.)

[DanielH]

Huh, according to this, Forks is snowiest in January with only three inches of snow that month, which isn't too bad. Given that there are about 18 inches of precipitation, though, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of ice even if the average low is barely above freezing.

Would it be plausible for a Bell living in Forks to just not walk outside much when it's icy, if the elementary and middle schools were each one building, so there was no need to go outside during school except for recess?

[Alicorn]

Yeah, they aren't particularly outdoorsy.

[cbhacking]

Speaking as somebody who lives in Seattle and has driven through Forks, temperatures are very moderate. Forks is on a peninsula surrounded by the Pacific ocean and under near-constant overcast skies; the temperature really just doesn't vary much. It definitely drops below freezing occasionally at might, but not to the degree of freezing terribly much; Seattle averages nearly as cold and gets more cold, clear nights, yet it's very rare for the sidewalks to have significant ice on them unless it snowed recently, then melted and refroze (this does happen on rare occasion). Snow is a little more common in Forks but clear winter nights probably aren't (though I don't have an actual statistic on that).

Forks is also rather tiny - you can drive through it in a few minutes, and that's not at freeway speeds - so dropping somebody off by car isn't a big imposition time-wise. There wouldn't be a lot of need for Bella to walk around outside, though I imagine she'd still be extra-wary in the winter.

[Timepoof]

I am not quite clear why some things are antipractice and some are not.
For example why does wished grace and being Downsided interact like it does with Shell?

[DanielH]

There are some shoe covers which are supposed to give you more traction on ice. I have not used them but expect they also make you a bit wobblier when not on ice.

Would they potentially help Canadian or other Northern Bells?

[Unbitwise]

(I have used 'em. Since the metal bits don't go all the way to the edge unless your shoe is small, you're standing on a smaller, ahem, footprint, and the parts you do have are faintly wobbly. But they are very, very grippy on ice — you're not going to slip at all.)

[Alicorn]

Things are antipractice when according to my mental model of how they work they actively teach the Bell to skip the things that will make her stabler under normal conditions, or to do things incompatible with those habits. Shoe covers sound useful for Bells who grow up in Forks; Canadians jump for the wheelchair solution but e.g. Phaetonbell can have shoe covers.