Ice

A couple of people went through the ice last week on a nearby lake. They were rescued, thankfully, but it always sends a shock and a reminder.

It is ice fishing season, or it is supposed to be: within a day or two of these people falling in, the temperature had climbed to over fifty degrees! The snow melted away, leaving just sand on our stone walkway, which had an easier time riding into the house on the bottom of our boots. (I am encouraging us to do morning stretching exercises on the floor. You can feel the sand on the rugs long before you can see it. I will say that.)

Perhaps the unlucky souls who got very cold and wet were impatient to fish. They have augers, and it may have seemed fine where they drilled the first couple of test holes, but lakes and ponds can be tricky around here. Most of the water bodies are the result of dams built in the last century. The water flows underneath the ice in unpredictable ways. We live on such a body of water, and I have never walked directly across the broad middle, even knowing the ice is four feet thick near our shoreline. Our pond gets to a depth of nearly sixty feet out there someplace. Water pours over the spillway of the dam all winter long. There are better, narrower places to cross.

We will do that when the time comes because venturing onto the frozen pond with two feet is liberating. It is a marvelously open space, like a winter field. Blazingly bright and antarctic on a sunny day and wild as the northern tundra in wind-driven snow, which will have you conjuring a team of dogs quivering to pull a sled. We have canoes, kayaks, and a small sailboat to enable our enjoyment of the water in summer in addition to swimming. But we are land animals; it means more to walk on the water. And a few times a year, we get to do that, which is when I take out my mobile device and snap a selfie.

Here I am, on top of the pond.

Circumnavigating the pond on foot is how we have grown to know it. You can get only so close to the pond’s edges by boat in the off-ice season. Protruding limbs and bramble get in the way, the shallows of mud, nesting ducks. Thick foliage hides whatever else. But free to walk the shore from the water’s edge, we ‘hop on/hop off' to poke around the banks, wander upstream, and discover new clearings and hidden networks of stonewall.

When it was suddenly fifty degrees several days ago, I grew hopeful that we would be able to skate, in addition to walk, on the pond. The rise in temperature turned the snow-covered surface to water. Had a few--maybe more--days of freezing temperatures followed without snow, we might have had quality pond ice, which is superior to the artificial ice of indoor rinks. Artificial ice is noticeably softer when you skate on it. True, charging down the rink and abruptly turning your skates sideways to stop will shave a snow cone’s worth of soft ice in the direction of your friends and impress the girls, but do not think yourself that sharp. Pond ice is the hard body. The distinction is valid for all ice machines, by the way. For this reason, we are happy to use ice cube trays at home in our freezer. Removing and refilling them requires dedication, but it is a small price to pay for ice that does not melt so rapidly in our cocktails.

Winter sports fans around here are willing to pay an even higher price shoveling rink-size parcels of a pond for skating. They must be at it quickly following snowfalls to minimize the melting and freezing underneath, which is what pebbles the ice, making it bumpy. Some roll out hoses at night to flood the surface and roll them up again. In the dark. After work. In the winter cold. Where there is no available lake or pond, there is a long tradition in places of building rinks out of spare lumber scavenged from home improvement projects. I remember this in Buffalo, driving past houses, the front yards of which had been converted to hockey rinks.

The pond has been making its whale noises this week, a groaning, haunting sound that echoes under the ice. Presently, I will drop a couple of small cubes in a glass from our trays in the freezer. I will pour my libation and wait for the sound of the cubes to start cracking, which they always do as they are forced to give up their frozen-ness for liquid again. It is a lot of this or that for water—frozen, not frozen, almost frozen, cold, hot, boiling, steam. No wonder the ice cracks and groans. I do not go through nearly the same number of contortions on an average day, and I crack and groan.

It is another reason to treat the ice with respect.