NAPLES – The first part of the challenge was fighting panic and finding a way to breathe. With his face buried in snow and most of his body immobilized, George Sovas of Naples had few options. He started by eating snow, blowing it with his mouth, trying to move it with his nose.

Where there’s a will, as the adage goes, there’s a way.

For two hours Tuesday, the 57-year-old Sovas was buried upside down and headfirst in a giant mound of ice and snow that slid off his ex-wife’s house roof.

“The only thing sticking up was my butt and my legs,” Sovas said Wednesday night. “I was headfirst and backwards in the snow. It was packed like concrete.”

It had started as a good deed.

On Tuesday afternoon, Sovas got his ladder on top of a snowbank in order to clear ice from his ex-wife’s roof on Liberty Road. The winter has been particularly severe though, and ice and snow built up on the roof, and Sovas wanted to clear a portion of it to prevent leaks and damage.

That’s when his premature burial began.

“I was trying to break a section of ice off the right corner of the house,” Sovas said. “But with that small jarring, the weight of the ice still up at the top ripped all of the cutters off the roof. It came down like a freight train and just wiped me out. It hit me in the chest. It threw me clear over the ladder upside down. It was like doing a backflip.”

Sovas went down and all of that ice and snow went with him. It was a recipe for peril, and after he became oriented, Sovas discovered the nature of the trouble he was in.

“I knew that I was upside down to some degree. I was head-first in,” he said. “My right arm and my neck and shoulder were buried. My left arm was buried except that my left hand was free. My first thought was that I needed to get air. I had to be calm, and I had to get air.”

Easier said than done.

“I started eating some of the snow, licking it, trying to blow an air hole. I did that for about 10 minutes. Then I realized I could use my fingers so I started flicking at the snow. Every time I did that, it would fall back into my face. I was trying to keep my head on straight. I thought, there’s got to be a way out of this,” Sovas said.

After a lot of squirming centimeters at a time, he got some of the snow away from his face. He did so by blowing a lot and trying to move his head back and forth.

“I’ve got a big nose so I could get away with that,” he said. “Finally, I could see. That was after about an hour and a half.”

He could see, but 90 minutes had passed and he was still immobilized. Sovas was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, both with flannel lining, but he was cold. He had to get out of the frigid hole and needed a real break to get it done.

Enter technology and some errant phone calls from friends.

“I was carrying an ATT cell phone in my pocket. I could feel it buzzing in my pocket. I thought, if I could only get that thing to vibrate and fall down, I might be able to get a call out.”

Two hours had now passed. Sovas tried to dig with his fingers toward the cell phone. He tried wriggling as much as he could to get the phone out of his pocket, understanding it might represent the last of his hope.

“I kept digging with my fingers, trying to release half my body on the left hand side. I knew if I did that, I might be able to force the phone out of my pocket. But you can’t move. You’re packed in.”

And so it continued. He dug and squirmed. He dug closer to the pocket and finally he could see the phone starting to slide out. But now Sovas had to worry that it would slip free only to disappear in the landscape of snow and ice around him.

“I kept shaking and shaking, and I kept my hand close by so that if it did fall, I could get it. Finally, when I shook it just enough, it fell into my hand. I flipped it open with my teeth and called 911.”

Still partially buried, Sovas could barely hear the dispatcher on the other end, even with the phone on speaker. But he knew someone was on the line and that they were sending help. It couldn’t come soon enough.

Enter Cumberland County Deputy Steve Welch, who came to the Liberty Road home and found Sovas in the heaps of ice and snow. It should have been over at that point, but there was more work to be done.

“He immediately tried to pull my arm out. I said, ‘you can’t do it that way. You’re going to have to dig me out,'” Sovas said. “He had to get shovels and dig me out.”

At last, Sovas stood in the light of day. He had bruises on his backside and his neck would eventually stiffen up. But the first order of business was getting his body temperature back up, and paramedics got right to it on the ride to Bridgton Hospital.

“They put me in a big bear hug to get my body warmed back up,” Sovas said.

A day after his freakish near tragedy, he’s had time to reflect on how untimely and embarrassing his demise would have been upside down in the snow. The horrible irony of it had occurred to him during the ordeal, as well.

“I kept thinking, I’m a snowmobiler, I’m president of the snowmobile club. I can’t die this way. I’m a survivor when it comes to things like this,” Sovas said. “You can’t give up. You don’t want to give up without fighting.”

Sovas was alive and warm Wednesday night. There is plenty of winter left, but the ice on the roof? Forget about it.

“Let it slide off; I’m not going there. Too dangerous,” Sova said. “Way too dangerous.”