Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost
Yesterday I got a call from my oldest, best friend B. We hadn't much spoken since my family was at his home in Massachusetts back in June. He grew up there, right across the big field and over the stone wall from the farm house where I spent my pre-adolescent childhood.
That beautiful farm I so dearly loved, with large fields of native hay, deep oak and maple woods and 17th century barn is a radically different place now. The barn is long gone, torn down and beams shipped out to be used for period restoration; they needed the frontage for a road. No longer pristine and homogenous, the fields had been unintentionally seeded with non-native grasses years ago while constructing the many houses now found within their fieldstone boundaries.
The wood lots and accompanying roads, where B, my brother and I used to collect kindling and load wood into the trucks as my father and grandfather felled and sectioned trees, are now conservation land and bike trails. The house is structurally the same but its masterful circular rock garden set atop a septic tank is no longer there. The immediate grounds have been re-lanscaped to closer reflect modern tastes.
Only the untouched, far reaching corners of the land remain the same.
My life closed twice before its close
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
My life closed twice before its close
by Emily Dickinson
B is a small town native. He may have the big lucrative carer in Boston but at heart he is all field and stream. His massive garden supplies produce for canning and pickles. An avid fisherman and hiker, B knows by heart the local brooks and where their trout reside. He's one of the funniest, kindest and most honest people I know. It always amuses me to note that he's also a die hard Republican.
Politics aside, we agree on just about everything that's important and lots of stuff that isn't. My second brother in all but blood our families are intertwined and our experiences as kids were largely the same. We were together all the time, and the most important memories from childhood, the ones you tell to folks who weren't there when you want to paint a picture of how life was, are remarkably and consistently the same. After two dozen years our wives are still surprised to hear us complete one another's tales. This shared memory is a treasured asset, our link to a past rich in detail and nuance.
So, when B called me up to say he's met some family friends at a Labor Day party, right there on my old homestead it was a pleasant surprise. These are the daughter and her husband of my grandparents best friends, the people who introduced them to our island in Maine. B didn't know them but had been in their home as a kid when it belonged to her parents. He had even been in their house on the island.
"You told them you've been going to the island since you were little, right?" I asked.
"Dude, are you kidding me? That's all we talked about. That and the pond. The house we were at is the one across from it. Their kid fell through the ice last winter and I was telling them about the time it happened to you." he said.
"The time you almost drowned."
"Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium,perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusion by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might be drived," if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts."
from The Pond in Winter
by Henry David Thoreau
The pond is a spring fed oval surrounded by old woods. It flows into a shallow brook that feeds a larger system, supplying nutrients and aquatic life that make for quality fishing downstream. It's big enough to host a junior regulation hockey game but the quality of the surface in winter can be generously described as "natural". All manner of sticks and leaves and organic debris was inevitably just below the surface, finding it's way out slowly through the winter as freeze/thaw cycles degrade the ice. Skating was hazardous and we had many accidents.
Catching the toe of your blade on an air pocket or a stick made for chin-first wipeouts when skating full out after the puck. Many times I experienced the jarring, aching impact of landing flat on my back while reversing direction. Sometimes you'd tap the back of your skull just right on that kind of fall and see stars. It was just another day on the ice at 7 or 10 years old. All of our activities were unsupervised, of course. From age six we were on our own, all day every day, while adults worked or attended to adult interests. Such was the case on New Years Day when an 8 year old me and a 9 year old B went out to test the ice.
The weather that year had been warmer than normal and the ground was devoid of snow. Our town was in the metro west snow-belt and a bare ground at the turn of the year was unusual. We hadn't skated in over a month and were excited by the recent cold snap and thus to skate. Leaving my house bundled up in snow pants for warmth and heavy jackets, B and I pulled on our gloves and hats and headed out across the field toward the pond. Following the dump road we wondered aloud about the status of the pond, reminding ourselves about how to best test the ice.
"You have to walk out sideways and bounce up and down and look at the bank and how much the water moves from underneath." one of us surely said.
"Some cracking is okay, it's gonna make cracking sounds. We have to listen for the running cracks and how deep they are." was surely the response.
The day was crisp and blue with temperatures in the high teens and smoke from our fireplaces painted the air with scents of maple and oak. As we walked farther afield my relatives from New Jersey stood around the dining room table picking smoked oysters and boiled shrimp from my grandmother's best service and my grandfather drank scotch with his brother, my namesake. New Years Day was a happy time, my favorite family gathering. The night before was cocktails and more smoked oysters, Auld Lang Syne and heading up into the attic to bid a happy new year to the ghost that made her presence known with pacing and stomping. Soon friends and family would begin their long drives home, but we still had time to possibly skate.
For a boy who knew the land and the cycles I should have known better than to test that ice. All around the edges water lapped the banks and most of the surface was the cloudy ice with bubbles that told a story of warm days and uneven freezing. Deep fissures ran through the center and as we looked the creaking was audible. Every so often a sharp crack rang out as the temperature slowly rose. The ice was unsafe.
Ever the daredevil I volunteered to try it out. B stood on the bank and begged me not to do it. I would be fine, I won't go out that far, I just want to see how bad it is, I told him. "Just be quiet and listen for cracks!" I shouted, a memory we both confirm. As I shuffled sideways keeping one eye on the bank I judged the distance and the steps back to safety. I bounced lightly and listened for the signs of collapse. It was holding up! This was great news! "Maybe we will be able to skate!" I told him and moved out further.
By now B was calling me back, scared and angry that I wouldn't listen, and my feeling suddenly changed. I knew he was right and planned to turn back when I realized the ice up ahead was clear. "Hang on, I'm gonna check this ice, you can see through it all the way to the bottom! And it's thick!" I called. And it was by almost a foot. "Dude, it's wicked thick over here!" I shouted. "You can see everything on the bottom. I'm gonna check this out for a sec." and slowly lay prone, face leaning over the edge of the clear zone.
On the bank B was calling and calling for me to return, telling me it wasn't safe and that I would fall through. He used every curse and swear he knew, vowing to leave me and insisting he was no longer my friend. I still remember the sound of his voice fading as my imagination carried me deeper into the visible depths. It was as Thoreau described, I was "looking down through the illusive medium,perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusion by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes" all along the bottom. Unfamiliar weeds and algae in vertical columns formed by the flow of water from the springs. It was a magical, unknown world, only to be seen through the magnifying ice of a still and frozen surface.
I dreamed that one had died in a strange place Near no accustomed hand, And they had nailed the boards above her face, The peasants of that land, Wondering to lay her in that solitude, And raised above her mound A cross they had made out of two bits of wood, And planted cypress round; And left her to the indifferent stars above Until I carved these words: She was more beautiful than thy first love, But now lies under boards.
A Dream of Death
by WIlliam Butler Yeats
"I'm fucking leaving you fucking asshole!" B yelled and finally got my attention. "Okay," I said "I'm coming back." At that moment I stood and a moaning crack ran slowly through the ice. It seemed to come from the other end of the pond and as I turned to look in the direction of the noise the ice gave way and I fell through.
So it often is in sudden and emergent situations my memory is a stretching of time. As I break though and sink my vision descends as on a slow moving elevator, my passing beneath the edge and underwater, a blur of bubbles. The sensation of cold is immediately numbing and my snow pants have taken on full water. The down jacket I wear is saturated and heavy and my knit wool cap leaves my head, never to be seen again. I am floating, sinking holding my breath. What was seconds is a still frame of video, hitching forward on fits and starts. I am going to drown in this pond. My friend can not help me. I need to breathe.
Somehow my hands find the edge of the ice. As I begin to push I am suddenly pulled up and out, propelled from the water and set foot down on solid ice. B is laughing and crying, an unexplained panic response to crisis he suffers to this day. He is calling out to me to run, run for the bank. Get off the ice. It's going to break up. And I am running for the bank and the ice is cracking to water underneath. I look behind and every step destroys it further. I am running literally on thin ice and it breaks beneath my feet but I do not sink again. I reach the edge, I reach B and his tear streaked face is still laughing. He is still swearing. I look back to where I fell through, a dozen yards from waters edge, and shiver. I am very cold. And now I'm shaking.
B and I started briskly toward the house, I now know that I was beginning to shock but at the time I couldn't call it. No longer cold I felt numb and tired. Moving was a chore. The entire way home B repeated the same mantra again and again.
"I can't believe you fell through! I can't believe you got out! How did you get out like that? I can't believe you got out!"
And I answered with my own questions through chattering teeth and heavy weight. "How did I get out? Did you pull me out? Did you see that ice breaking as I ran? Who pulled me out? How did I get out"
In my mind as I write this I can see the face of family and friends as I opened the door and walked into the house. Soaked, freezing, falling into shock I stood in the doorway and they stood and sat frozen in their places, drinks in hand, mouths agape in abrupt silence.
And finally B spoke.
"He fell through the ice."
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.