The sound of ice

If there’s anything that makes me feel 15 again, it’s walking along a frozen river’s edge. This was the Hudson, not the Mohawk of my youth, and I could hear the ice crack, threatening, as the tide lowered beneath it. Instead of using a tree branch to test the ice, I had very expensive trekking poles. The feeling of being out there on the edge of the frozen expanse, the crackling of the ice, the sound of the slate ice shattering under my poles and my snowshoes — it was just the same as when we were kids growing up along (and, often, in) the Mohawk River. I would have loved to have been able to venture out there, but that would have been deadly — tides and ice don’t go together. So instead, I just stood and listened to the river.

When we were younger, the Mohawk froze solid, sometimes right down to the bottom, and it was very safe to walk out there. Other times it would be perfectly thick in the middle but sketchy on the edges, and after a day of playing out on the ice, skating for miles or playing hockey, we would try to step up to the riverbank and would plunge into the cold water. (That happened quite a bit, in fact, and I still feel the effects of frostbite in my toes.) We always carried big sticks out on the ice, or used our hockey sticks to chop at anything that looked questionable. Sometimes you wanted to break through with the stick so that at least your feet would hit something more solid below. The scariest adventures would come during the thaws, when there was perfectly thick ice but it would start to break up and pile up behind the Western Gateway Bridge. Then there would be water moving among the ice, and it would refreeze but there would remain fault lines in the ice that were hard to predict. Sometimes you’d put a foot through some thin ice, and you’d hit water that was sitting on top of more ice — very slippery. But there was nothing like a day spent out on the ice, in a place that only exists for a few days each year, a place where no one else was. Sometimes it would just be miles of sheet ice like this picture, clear and skatable and beautiful; other times there would be gigantic blocks piled up, making ice caves and other dangerous attractions for 15-year-old boys.

So, Saturday afternoon was like that. Girls had a birthday party to go to, I invoked selfishness and went down to Schodack Island State Park to snowshoe. Did some vigorous work through deep snow as well as walking along the river’s edge. There was deer sign everywhere, and I found some significant owl pellets (fur only, no bones — must not have been done with that yet) and flushed the owl that had made them. The tremendous beat of its wings scared the hell out of me. Did about an hour and a half of hard hiking, snapped a few pictures, went on back home. Yesterday, nice skiing in super conditions, took the girls over on a trail that has never had enough snow to be open before, and that was a lot of fun, just a nice little jeep trail through the woods with perfectly fresh powder. I love watching them ski. Today, about 6″ of new snow in the morning, plus it’s cold again, currently a whopping 5 degrees.