On falling through pond ice

Winter days in the Midwest have this common characteristic: the sky becomes one giant, impenetrable low cloud that fastens itself like a cast iron lid down upon the horizon, sealing off escape and crowding our visibility from December to April. There are brief deviations from this scene, but they are brief and they are deviations. The squeeze can squelch a person’s propensity for hope and finding the world beautiful. 

The Midwest winter’s sky differs significantly from Florida’s, which is where I lived more than a decade of my childhood. Winter along the Gulf coast feel the humidity lifting, see farmers scurrying south, and fume at traffic lanes bulging to a spasmodic creep. It’s like a three-month long international flight that’s marked by anticipation, forests of people, and roadside citrus stands, though they are the best time for beaches. Summers are simply too warm with heat indexes of 110-115, an amalgamation of 98 and 100% humidity that runs from early June to late September. But life is all about being aware of your vantage point, so when December rolled around and 90 and 100% humidity dipped to the 30 or 40% and temperatures from the 90s to the 70s, we felt the shift, albeit minimal.  

My family moved to the Carolinas in the mid-1990s, setting my Floridian, seasonal experience in relief. I remember vividly telling mom that the late September days felt "different," that I loved these bright days cleared of humidity, when at high noon the rim of the blue world retained a deepened, ethereal azure and vibrant blue stretched behind the sun’s burning dot. This skyscape most violently pushed out the walls of my imagination to explore the new context of the Blue Ridge foothills with its rivulets, hiking trails, cliffs, and waterfalls "This is fall," she said. Nothing more. But something about the way she said it balanced the equation that had been befuddling me. I knew this season and its liminality, the winter coming. I was born on the Fall Equinox on 1978 and like to think that Fall is my season. It vibrates with possibility, its notes low and energizing, high and resonant—a lone cello on a stage that when it finishes reminds the audience they had forgotten to breath. When fall fades, however, I am unwilling to let its momentum be mocked by a season that has stolen the leaves, the sun, and the warmth. Winter may be playing “hard to get,” but it presses me to explore the world beneath the iron lid. 

It was beneath that sky that I went for a walk one day when three or four years old. If I were to guess more precisely, I would say January or February of 1982, maybe 1983. My hippocampus was old enough to retain the impression, and we were still living in southern Indiana. My brown Carhartt-style coveralls had a red lining and were an upgrade from my astronaut-looking first pair of coveralls that were a deep blue with red stars plastered about on white patches in what I guess were meant to be decorative places. Maybe more superhero-inspired than astronaut. They were otherworldly.  

My memory images of that day drift into one another. One is a faint impression of thinking, I'm going to go to the pond, and thinking that that idea was good, that it had been a while since I had been down there, that a dock in winter was a good place for me to explore on my own. There’s another of when I’m approaching the cattle gate on the right side of the barn—the east—and climbing over it and onto the muddy pockmarks made by cow hooves. The butcher ramp stands on the same side of the barn, derelict with its faded wood, splintering on the ends, bent and twisted with age. It hasn't been used since Grandpa Overholt had sold all of the pigs.  

Where the cows had gone, I didn't know. All was silent. No car rumbled down the gravel road adjacent to our field. Snow was absent. The gray sky was reflected in the gray grass, the gray trees, and the gray of the lake as I stepped awkwardly over and around and in the pockmarks now frozen stiff. It was an inconvenient twenty feet or so before I made it to the gray pasture-grass. A world of gray sharpens the sense of loneliness, highlighting in its own cruel way that no one else is around, that life has left one to face the elements, that no one is sharing your experience. Many find this experience oppressive, but true to form it energized me that morning. I have no traces of mental images in between the mudded pockmarks—the stalagmites of the wintry cave I was exploring—and the dock, but I can imagine finding the rim of the pond that the cows had tamped down hard as concrete on hot summer days and following the rim to where the gangplank joined pasture and pond. This dock was in its last days. Oblivious to the fact that within a decade or so the coal mine would destroy it, the pond, and the one hundred acres stretching eastward—including the larger pond on the back half of the property—its gray world invited me to put action to intention and clamber aboard. Temperature changes—heat in summer, cold in winter—had worked some of the nails outward, their flat, rusty heads poking up to see the winterscape like groundhogs in harvest. Planks that had once been brown and flat were now twisted and grayed, warped by summer. Some were missing as I stood upon the dock, my destination reached, a world of gray reflecting gray reflected gray unrolled in front of me. 

What's a boy to do when alone in the world, his intention fulfilled and the listlessness of his adventure sinking in, other than look around and mess around? Some may call it tinkering; others, fooling around. It's all the same. Adventuring in childhood often tells us that we didn't dream big enough. Adventuring in adulthood often proves we dreamed too confidently. In what life will we adequately judge ourselves within our worlds? On this morning I realized suddenly that my world was too small and that the best I could do was play in it, enjoying the details as only boyhood could enjoy them. Which is about the time that I saw the ice. Whether the ice was the first etchings of winter or among its last, I cannot tell. That piece of context isn't among the impressions. What is vivid, as vivid as last evening watching the July 4th fireworks reflected in the Iowa River and off the Old Capitol's golden dome, is the fact that the ice was not pond-wide. It lay along the pond's edge, a ledge wide enough for me to think that stepping on it sounded like a good idea. Again, whether the ice was reaching out for or receding from itself lying on the opposite side—I cannot say. Boyhood doesn't care. It would be cool just to be able to step on it.

Which I did. And why not? What I knew of pond ice was limited but not just because this was when I was four. There are among the most festive impressions from childhood an impression of a skating party. My dad and mom are skating about along with a half-dozen or so other people. The pond is aglow with light, kerosene burning in buckets that scatters its light up into the stars above and out among the skaters. The darkness of the wintry night has invited us out to see its serenity, to feel its magic in the buzzing stillness of what it can do with water and how we can enjoy it. I am on the pond's hard, packed rim, watching even those who are less dexterous on winter's most breathtaking playground beaming at the uniqueness of this experience, their hands beneath blankets as they watch the more dexterous, relishing the grandness of the evening by simply attending. Now I'm out on the ice, shuffling from one lamp to another, amazed at the flame floating above the fuel, swelling this way and now that, a cloud built of flame pushed by a Midwestern breeze. I want skates. I want to swish about, too, like Dad, who seems to be the host of this spectacle. 

I don't remember the ice cracking. I remember thinking about stepping, stepping, and finding myself waste deep in icy water, clambering as quickly as possible up onto the pond's rim and realizing my grand adventure is ending differently than I imagined. Next, I’m walking the sidewalk connecting my grandparents' house to our daughty house, my coveralls dark—the color of mud—to my dry uppers, the color of sand. Mom’s a fright when she sees what could have happened. What if the ice had been out past the edge of the dock, and I had stepped there? We haven't moved to Florida yet where I'll learn to swim at a pool with a bunch of retirees. She believes I would have drowned.

I realize that there are several ways to process this impression of falling through ice on a wintry day in southern Indiana. I could carry on the parental horror my mother felt, but I never felt afraid during this experience. Adding fear of drowning and thankfulness for surviving are anachronistic emotions, stale or trite attempts at making meaning of this memory. If I felt anything it was concern about being in trouble, knowing I went where I shouldn’t have gone. Which is typical of me. Guilt, for me, can pervade any moment, if I let it, but it’s not a means for making meaning. 

Another route, like a little flame, leaps at the suggestion that these memory images are a part of a greater story of what inspires me. Winter seems to feed on the oppression of the masses, overstaying its welcome gray month after gray month. I’m sure that at some point I will tire of it because I, too, love sun and warmth, the satisfaction of exercising when it’s most intense. Sweat equity provides a great change of pace for a person who grew up on a construction site but now works indoors. But loving the sun does not make me dislike the gray. Gray suits winter. Spring is verdant, summer intense, and fall vibrant. Winter rounds out the color spectrum and makes the other seasons all that more enjoyable. I have lived in coastal, southern areas most of my life with their temperate seasonal changes. People who live through intense cold show a deeper appreciation for the warmer months. They’re more willing to get outside and enjoy the months when they can. Sure, you will hear southerners say they love the heat. What they mean is that they like sunshine from the comfort of the air-conditioning. I have seen fewer people running during Carolina summers than I have in Iowa winters. Diversity in any context breeds greater appreciation.

Gray winter has its own invigorating beauty. A warm room with a book or a desk with pen and blank paper and I am off adventuring in my mind the way I went adventuring on a gray day in brown coveralls to a country, icing pond. The iron lid gives incentive, inviting me to focus more mindfully on the context immediately around me, to explore and appreciate features of my world regularly overlooked. But on occasion, the more boyish me chooses a country pond rimmed with ice and weeds and cow trails on the other side of a cattle gate.