As I touched my right foot down onto the ice, on the spot where just months prior water sloshed about as the wind picked up slightly, I immediately felt a sense of security. I thought every step of the next three miles would be tedious and terrifying and that I would bestow my entire trust to this walking stick. It turns out, I never even needed the stick, and we walked footloose and fancy-free across that Lake Manona. My companion remembers walking this lake as a child, since it freezes sixteen inches thick every several years. She said they would skate across the expanse to downtown, such a grown-up experience for those little ones. This day, we passed a few families also skating, although they seemed to have no rhyme or reason to their path. They carved circles in the ice, wrote their names with the blades, chased each other until they fell over in pain from too much giggling. Their routes would be gone by spring, as would their giggles because recess is only 15 minutes these days.
As we walked, I kept my eyes down, hoping to see some kind of eel or whale or turtle or alligator pass below the ice. Not even a large fish came to say hello. There were many bubbles frozen in time, but my walking partner says this happens from the ice expanding and not from passing aquatic life. Perhaps more unsettling are the too-large cracks drawing thruways across the lake. When the ice expands and contracts, you can hear the pop and you just know in that moment that life was good while it lasted and boy what a way to go. You brace yourself, knowing that this walking stick will do no good at the bottom of this city lake, unless there is in fact an alligator and you could poke its eye out in self-defense. Although the eye blood would only attract the eels, so it’s really a lose-lose situation.
Time is a funny thing on a frozen lake. You can’t help but feel frozen yourself, pausing to breathe the icy air. You have to be so present, and that presence causes time to freeze. Every step, every inch of that ice, is at the same moment exactly the same as the last yet the most distinct it could ever be. It is all slippery and clear, yet has a mind of its own. I wonder if the ice has a name? I wonder if the ice will be glad when it can reunite with its sloppy self in the spring? It must be exhausting to tense up so much that you become ice, still and hard and thick and cracking. What stresses it so? Perhaps it’s the car I drove to meet my friend, or the plastic straw my lunch restaurant will give me with coffee, or the inevitable rush of boats upon melting. I’d be exhausted, too, never getting a break. Always expanding or contracting, melting or evaporating. Winter provides a reprieve, then, a time to pause and breathe, just like I do as I stand completely surrounded by ice.
Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin, January 2018
Kelly Green Guilbeau 