Lost in the Galaxy

The shortest day gives way to reveries on ice.

By Peter M. Leschak

Our dogs refused to romp on the ice. The sheet was transparent and smooth, and I think it spooked them to see the bottom of the lake beneath their paws. I suspect they had traumatic puppy memories of splaying out in four directions on sleek ice, spinning askew while skating humans–uncharacteristically fleet and graceful–laughed and hooted. Dogs resent embarrassment, and also seem to understand the risky nature of walking on water.

It was the winter solstice. Just two days earlier, following the warmest November on record and a tepid December, Big Sturgeon Lake had finally frozen over. We had yet to enjoy a subzero day. The warm weather was odd and disorienting.

Just after Thanksgiving a lovely winter storm blustered for 36 hours, heaping 9 inches of snow on bare ground and delivering instant winter. The timing was exquisite. My wife, Pam, and I had spent part of November in Brazil. One afternoon we were watching monkeys cavort in a tropical rain forest, and 18 hours later we were driving 200 miles north from Minneapolis, buffeted by the blizzard. Delightful.

But then the temperature rose into the low 40s, and Dec. 5 it rained half an inch. Our quilt of snow congealed into a swamp of slush. When colder weather returned, we were left with a shell of rutted crust. December rainfall is vain theater.

A rind of ice struggled to form around the shore of Big Sturgeon, but most of the lake remained open, glinting in dim hibernal sunshine, as out of place as winter mallards or New Year’s Day baseball. But finally a calm night and a morning low of 5 degrees conspired to transform the lake into a 2,000-acre rink.

Neil, a friend and neighbor, drilled a test hole on the afternoon of Dec. 20 and phoned me on the solstice. He announced 4 1/2 inches thickness–good enough for foot travel.

Five of us gathered on McCarthy Beach and shuffled gingerly across 50 yards of rough, refrozen ice–remnant of the original rind–to reach the pristine expanse of fresh glaze. The dogs watched, tap dancing on snow-streaked sand. Neil dragged a sled of kindling and birch and started a campfire on the ice. We packed venison sausage. It was an hour before the solstice sunset, but the sky was mostly overcast, a dark gray shield of high stratus predicted to spit snowflakes by morning. A narrow slash of blue sky framed the northwestern horizon, and I hoped the rent in the cloud deck might give us a colorful twilight.

We doffed our boots and pulled on hockey skates. I was glad my blades were freshly honed. The ice was glassy-hard, and dull blades would’ve left me helpless as a puppy.

Rising from knees to skates the first time in a season is like placing weight on a broken leg after surgery. It’s tentative. But when the blades bite, and you push off across an arena stretching away for two miles, it’s also like the moment of exhilaration suffusing your head when you leap from a cliff above deep water. You soar. But instead of the vertical plunge, you soar into a glide, and caution soon evaporates for another year. The glide swerves into a rhythm–the snicker-snack of blades in tempo with exultant puffs of breath.

We skated northeast with the wind, steering for a far rocky point. Neil unfurled a multicolored bird-shaped kite, and it surged into the air like a startled grouse. In our boreal forest community, a frozen lake is our field, our meadow–the only truly open "ground" that provides long vistas, or windy fuel for kites. We soon saw a bald eagle circling 300 feet overhead, and I wondered aloud if it was attracted by the banking and diving of Neil’s tethered bird.

Over shallow water I watched rocks, weeds, and schools of minnows flash by beneath my blades, then felt a twinge of delicious alarm as the view snapped to blackness over deep water. When we turned back into the wind, our campfire was a tiny orange twinkle in the distance, glimmering like Aldebaran or Betelgeuse or some other fiery star, and making us feel as if we were interstellar voyagers on an infinite plane of space time, lost in the galaxy. But the wind was more substantial. As we reoriented from back to face, its surprising force became abruptly evident. To make headway we had to bend at the waist and pump with elbows and thighs, stroking against the current of the gale.

As the sun lowered, slanted light probed the hole in the overcast sky. Filtered by a screen of cirrus, it stained the clouds and the ice to red and yellow. By the time we reached our fire, the color of sundown spread out from below our feet to the far horizon and arched over our heads to the zenith in a seamless bow of crimson gold. Only the black margin of the tree line divided lake and sky. We twirled on our skates, cutting into color, rushing through color, inhaling color. The tableau lingered like a dying fire.

I reveled in our twilight world of glowing ice, in the keen exhilaration sparked by seeing a familiar landscape in a fresh way–in a new light, literally. To augment the pleasing strangeness, I lay down and pressed an ear to the ice. The sheet itself was softly groaning, probably responding to falling temperatures. But louder and sharper were the scraping skates of my companions. The blades were like fingernails on the skin of a tambourine, teasing music from the cold membrane of ice.

I rolled onto my back, feet pointing southwest, and faced the sky. The sunset paint was beginning to fade from the clouds, now pale orange fringed in black. Looking straight up offered no perspective, no sense of distance. I turned my head to the right, cheek on the ice, gazing northwest. The well of clear sky was still there, now dusky azure and wider. Eye-level with the lake, I couldn’t see the far shore. The dome of cloud, grooved and serrated by high-altitude wind, seemed to scroll from south to north. Feathering into the blue sky and reflected in the ice, it merged into lake with no interference from land or forest. I was in a magnificent loop of tinted air and enameled ice, balanced on the cusp of the season and keenly aware of celestial mechanics.

Hello!–the winter solstice, the sun-stand, the shortest day of the year–our revolving, rotating planet tipping the Northern Hemisphere away from our yellow star. With my cheek on the December ice, and my line of sight all angular, I saw Earth as a platform in space, and lost in the galaxy, indeed.

I wished for no longer day.

Freelance writer Peter M. Leschak lives on Side Lake.