Issues → January/February 2009 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Classic: Seasons of Ice

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(page 3 of 4)

A strong wind picked up and we unzipped out coats, opening them out to our sides, as though they were wings. We needed frictionless ice and a north wind to sail that night, and we got it.

In time a snowstorm came howling from the northeast, burying the black ice beneath a foot of snow. The snow had three effects: it destroyed the black ice, creating slabs of snow ice formed as a result of water spurting to the top of the snow and melting it; it blocked the sunshine to the lake, thus shutting off photosynthesis and beginning the winter kill of millions of organisms in the lake; and it caused me to change the pattern of my days.

The morning skates around the lake were now gone, replaced by long walks across the lake to the post office. The snow on top of the good crust of ice attracted the ice fishermen, the only ones who found the transparent ice distasteful. Closely stacked ice shacks sprang up on the lake by late January. Early on cold mornings I'd see the same men trudge across the ice wrapped in thick coals, until they disappeared into the brown weathered shacks, not emerging for hours on end.

One evening I went out with Tom, broke a few holes, baited a line, and put in our tip-ups. We wanted pickerel, and we took the time to gouge out the deep troughs in the snow ice to keep our catch fresh. Our nags sprang up in lime, and we shot forward, jolted out of our lassitude. We had an eel and a catfish waiting. Wanting neither we cut the lines. That was the end of ice-fishing season for us.

By late March we knew the ice was changing fast. Sometimes while walking to the post office across the lake, we'd pinch through the ice, and it would give slightly, as though suddenly grown rubbery. Along the shore, we'd see the same needlelike crystals we saw at the first signs of ice in November, as though we were unwinding a tape of the winter. The ice that I had relied on throughout the winter could no longer be trusted.

Not only was the ice melting slowly from the top, but it was also being eroded from below by warm water sloshing against its belly. Honeycombs with cracks and fissures appeared. As it melted from the bottom, vertical candles of ice grew, holding each other up like dominoes. We would look down and see long, dagger-like crystals adhering together. If we nudged them with our chisel they'd crack instantly with barely a whisper of protest. As the ice began to melt, the lake water began to cool to its coldest point of the year, but the balance was irreversibly shifted and the spring deathwatch for ice-out began.

The ice broke free from the river banks first, and large cracks appeared. A chunk of ice pushed water before it, nudging weakening ice ahead: the shoreline eroded faster each day.

It was no time to be loose on the ice, though giant cakes of it remained, seemingly thick enough to support a horse, but thoroughly rotten and weak, its tension destroyed.

One warm afternoon the thermometer read 70 degrees beneath a bright sun. Tom and I chipped ice ten feet from shore to make ice cream. The ice was the darkest since December, with a film of new ice formed from water just released from below the ice sheet. Small pools of open water formed like potholes between the ice floes and for over an hour Tom eyed them. When the ice cream had thickened, he stripped quickly, leapfrogged among the ice floes, and jumped into the water. Two weeks still remained until the lake was free, but watching Tom lift himself from the water, his elbows extended on the ice, emerging in shivering ecstasy --; this signified ice-out for me.