First Ice
On the morning the lake makes up its mind.
The lake takes most of November to make up its mind. Some years the ice comes in the second week, lays down clear and dark, and I am out on it with a stick by Sunday. Some years the lake stays open into December, restless, gray, with a kind of personal anger I have learned to recognize. This year it went the other way. We had a cold snap on Veterans Day, three days at six degrees. By the morning of the fourteenth there was glass.
I went out before breakfast. Not on it - I am not yet that confident, and the new ice is two inches at most. I went down to the dock with the dog, a thermos, and the stick I keep in the boathouse for exactly this purpose. The stick is a length of old cedar, rounded at the end from years of being knocked against dock posts. I use it to test edges, to push debris off the dock, and once a winter, for the small ceremony of striking the new ice.
The sound is what I came down for. New ice, two inches thick, struck with a stick: it is the cleanest note I know. Almost a wood sound. There is a long ring after the strike, a kind of singing, and then it travels. You can hear it move out across the lake, getting longer and lower as it goes, and it doesn't stop the way you think it will. Eventually it just becomes the lake.
The cabin changes when the lake changes. In the open season the eye keeps going past the dock, past the far shore, into the next county. In the ice season the eye stops at the ice and holds there. There is more time in winter. I think that is what the ice does. It holds the time still long enough for you to see it.
By eight I was back in the kitchen with the kettle on. The first ice is not the deep ice. The deep ice comes in February, with a different sound. But the first ice is the announcement: the lake is going to do this. We are going to be quiet for a while.
I will be down there with the stick again tomorrow.