The Ice Takes Its Time

“It’s ready.” That was Pete on the phone, the first weekday after New Year’s, and he did not have to say what. I had been checking the lake every morning through the holidays, walking down to the end of my dock to look at the gray skin forming along the shore, then going back up to the kitchen to watch it from the window. Around here, ice is something you wait on the way other places wait on the mail.

I have lived on this lake long enough to remember when the road down to it was gravel. The lake is not big. It has a shallow north bay, a deep bowl in the middle, and a narrows where the wind always finds you. In summer it carries boats and skiers and the sound of people calling to one another across the water. In November the docks come out and the shore goes quiet. By Christmas the north bay usually has a white skim in the mornings, but the middle stays open and black, breathing. January is what changes that. January is when the lake stops being water and becomes a floor.

The First Walking Ice

Ice does not arrive all at once. It comes in stages, and you have to be paying attention. First the north bay lays down a white skim that melts by noon. Then a cold night with no wind puts a pane over the whole bay, and in the morning it is still there. That is the worst ice of the month, the most tempting and the least true. It will hold a rock, but not a child, and not a dog who thinks it is holding a child.

So we wait. Pete has the auger. His grandfather bought it, and it still cuts if you let the blade do the work. He drills test holes every few days, first from the bank, then a little farther out, walking carefully, the way you walk on a floor you are not sure was built right. The sound tells as much as the auger. Clear ice rings. Soft ice thuds. Snow ice crunches.

Thickness matters, yes. But so does the kind of cold that made it. A January that gives you ten clear nights in a row—cold, dark, windless nights—produces black ice, hard and bare, the color of an old tire. It is ice that has taken its time, and you can feel the difference under your boots. A January that snows early is different. The snow lands on the new ice like a blanket and slows everything down. The ice comes in white and spongy, and it never quite trusts you the same way.

Pete has a piece of rebar with a hook on the end that he uses to drag the cuttings out of the hole. Good ice comes up in fat blue-green shards, and they clink when you drop them. Bad ice comes up crumbly and white, like wet sugar. We have all seen enough wet sugar to know not to argue with it.

This year gave us the good kind. Pete called on that Friday afternoon, and by mid-afternoon we were standing at the end of his driveway, looking down at the lake. The wind had laid down. The surface went from shore to shore without a wrinkle. Pete walked out with the auger, and we watched from the bank like people waiting for a verdict. He drilled a hole, pulled the slush out, and stood there. “She says yes,” he called. A hole in the ice cannot actually say yes, but that one did.

A Room With No Walls

The first good walking day is something you hear about. By the time I got my boots on, Margie from next door was already out there with her granddaughter, and Lou had dragged a sled down the bank with a plywood floor and two folding chairs on it. The lake went from empty to occupied in about forty minutes. That is January’s best trick. The same water that in July you cannot cross without a boat becomes the biggest room in the neighborhood.

We did not shovel a rink this year. The ice was smooth enough on its own, and there is a stretch in front of my place where the wind keeps it clear. The kids found it first. They played something that was half hockey and half tag, using a frozen tennis ball and two boots for goals. Margie’s granddaughter fell down every few minutes and did not cry once. Pete’s boy Amos was the oldest, so he was the referee, and he took the job seriously until somebody hit a snowbank, after which he took the job of wrecking the snowbank.

Somebody built a fire in a steel barrel at the edge of the ice. My wife brought down a thermos of coffee and a pan of bars, and the bars were gone before the coffee got poured. We stood around the barrel with our backs to the wind and talked about January things: whether the plow would come before the school bus, whether the furnace would make it, why the lake had taken so long this year. Nobody solved anything. The coffee ran out. The light went blue in the trees, and the ice under our boots made the particular sound ice makes at dusk—a clean, low note, like something far away had been struck.

The fire stayed lit after the last of the kids went in. The adults pulled the sled up close and sat on it with our hands around warm mugs. It was cold in the way only January can be cold, cold enough to hurt your teeth when you breathe it, but nobody was trying to get warm. We were exactly warm enough. The lake held all of us without a sound.

The Kind of Cold It Takes

That is what I want to remember about January. It is a month for leaving your house on purpose, toward something. The lake has made a road, and the road is wide open. You can walk in January to places that would be an hour’s paddle in June. You can stand where the dock floats in August and feel the whole lake under you, solid as a field.

The ice is not permanent, and that is part of it. A thaw can come in the middle of the month, turning the floor into sponge and opening dark lines along the shore. We do not get a full January every year. Some years the lake holds only a skim until the last week and then the snow comes and buries it. Those years we make do. We walk the closed road and call it exercise. No fire barrel. No hockey. No standing around.

But when January does it right, it gives you a stretch of ice that has had time to become itself. You have to take it when it offers. You have to call the neighbor and say what he already knows, or answer the phone and say it back. We did. We took it. And on the last afternoon before a slow snow moved in, I went out alone after the others had come in, not to be alone but to hear the ice with no voices over it. It sang in a low key underneath the snow. I walked out to the middle, where the lake is deepest, and stood there for a minute. Then I walked back to the fire barrel, which was still warm. January is for standing on the thick, true, taking-its-time ice with the people who waited for it.