Rare Ice

As the blood moon hung in an ice sky above Long Pond, the forces of the rare and the strange were weaving together a different, yet just as singular phenomenon — one that I would discover by the light of the next day. 

What was rare (other than the strange moon) about that evening?

The temperature was one thing.

When the rain had been falling the previous morning, it had been close to 50 degrees in Ledyard, Connecticut. Yet, all that water spilled out on the layer of black ice over Long Pond, a remnant of the freezing conditions earlier. As the rain let up, the wind began to howl.

Gale winds ripped along the surface, but could only stir up the tiniest waves as they tormented the inch-deep water. Here was a dark patch racing over ice, converging there with another patch, and then exploding away. The theatrics were beautiful, but they held no match for the relentless cold dropping into the valley.

Between afternoon and midnight, the temperature bellyflopped from 50 down to five degrees.

The new day saw the rainwater frozen, consolidated to the ice below.  This new surface seemed smooth enough (and firm enough) from the family dock, that I regretted no longer owning any ice skates that fit.

It was rare that Long Pond ice was thick enough to go out on however, so I thought about ways to keep it interesting. 

With a foam sled under one foot, and ice studs strapped to the other, I could kick myself along scooter style. I found I could move quickly,  if awkwardly, around this way. Since I was the first one going out on the ice, I took the additional precaution of wearing my drysuit and life vest and carrying an ice axe to pull myself out of unexpected holes. I moved away from the dock and found that as I went further along, the ice got rougher.

 I was leaving the shelter of the peninsula to the north, entering the place where the wind had blown full power the day before. The gusts had contorted the thin layer of rain-water into strange branching patterns and the cold froze it into place. 

I thought about how the little surface water had trembled beneath the cold wind, then subsided. There was cruelty to this art, but it was no less mesmerizing for it.

The rough texture forced me to stop scootering and walk like a (semi) normal person with the foam sled under my arm, looking down at how the patterns changed as I walked around the lake.

A point jutting out in the water made a crisp line in the ice, where it was dark on one side, lightened by bubbles on the other side. 

The ice got thinner here as I got closer to running water by the dam. Still, the sight of a completely new, strange type of ice lured me closer to the danger. Here, the fluttering surface water had condensed into little mountain ranges. The mountains were angular, almost art-deco looking to my eyes. In another place, the ice was foamed up in a series of intricate fractal curves. 

A couple feet away, the landscape reminded me of something closer to the tall Lake Superior smashups that I used to admire. Here the ice was clashed together in six-inch fins, curves radiating along the surfaces as though they were translucent topo maps.

I watched, uneasily, as water oozed out beneath the ice and lapped the island shore.

I scooted myself back to thicker footing, then started walking back toward the dock.

A gray figure was walking out on the ice now too. As the figure approached, I saw that it was my father.

The wind had begun whipping mightily. Little lines of powder whirled down the lake, twisting into snow devils. It was too bad we didn’t have our skates. Years ago, when the wind had been like this, we’d had held a tarp between us and ripped high-speed down the ice. 

Now, we had to find other ways to get in trouble.

We walked across Lantern Hill Road to Bush Pond where the ice was thick enough — at least to start.

The black ice was smoothest in the sheltered area where we started walking, but further out it developed the same branching texture I’d seen on Long Pond. 

We rounded the point to the cove where the waterfall was. It was even more frozen than I had expected. One night and one day of single digit temperatures had turned the 10-foot drop-off into a corrugated white-wall of ice. 

“There must’ve been an ice dam that made the stream go around.” I said. “It widened the whole thing out.”

Lily pads and milfoil were suspended in the water beneath our feet as we walked into the cove. Closer to the waterfall, I saw another shift in ice morphology. The cracks looked thinner, the bubbles closer. Hell, it wasn’t just the way the ice looked; it felt springy now, like a bamboo floor, no longer hard tile underfoot.

“We should back up,” I said.

But it was hard to find anyplace to go ashore. Warm water from the stream had seeped all along the north side of the cove. Finally, I found a place that looked like it might be firm enough. I scooted on the sled, maybe 15 feet away from shore. The ice was feeling springy again, I heard a crack. 10 feet away now. 

I could turn back, but I really want to get closer to the magnificent waterfall.

The ice cracked again and I then I was in thigh deep mud water.

“I’m fine,” I called to my dad. “This spot probably isn’t going to work.”

I turned back around. In the drysuit, the water didn’t affect me much. I could smell the sulfurous rot of the shallows where my feet had sank in the muck. I pulled myself up using the axe, only to have the ice break away again. I pulled up a second time. This time, it was thick enough.

I decided I wanted to try another time back at the mouth of the stream. My dad, who was not wearing a drysuit, hung back on thicker ice. 

I scooted back onto the sled. The ice chunked and protested again, but this time, it held long enough for me to scoot over to a log. I balanced my way across and onto shore where the waterfall stood. The modest falls had armored itself in massive sheets of ice. A rooster-tail of water careened over the top and dribbled down the front of the frozen forward column. The bulk of the flow was beneath, however, making a soothing shushing sound like water on a pebble beach.

Compared to the tiny, angular craftwork of the lake ice, this sculpture was far more freeform and bulbous, an expression of pouring, rather than standing water. 

I felt ice forming around the pants where I had plunged in. If I lingered much longer, I was going to get frozen into the installation.

As I thought on the qualities of different ice that I’d seen in different corners of Long Pond and Bush Pond, I decided that the complexities in the neighborhood ice deserved an entirely new field of study.  For the final exam students get different chunks of ice — and then try to deduct which corner of the lake they had come from. They would draw up a map that showed how the wind gusts had whirled around different landmarks around the shore during the night of the blood moon. The map would identify the sweet spots where the lake dynamics had forged out the most exquisite diamond ice. 

Ice historians would examine the unique series of events, that led to a thin water layer, freezing on top of the ice on one particularly windy, icy night. Such circumstances seem at least as unique as those required to make a perfect diamond. The final product would be even more valuable for being so short-lived. The ice was definitely more anomalous than the entirely predictable consequences of Earth, moon and sun lining aligning to create the blood moon. 

When I think of it that way, I don’t feel so bad that I slept through the whole thing.