A pond I could skate away on

I closed my last post with words I borrowed -- and if you followed the link, with a performance -- from the consistently wonderful Joni M. I put them there not because “I made my baby cry” (as she said she did), but because those words “I wish I had a river/I could skate away on” and their music have always resonated with me in winter. What resonates is of course Joni’s own voice, the clear and yearning ache of it, her words, and the thought of her coming of age in Saskatoon and the bitterness of the winters there that would freeze rivers and coulees for endless miles of flying on your skates into whatever kind of ecstasy or oblivion you were seeking.

We did go skating yesterday with our new skates on the Frog Pond, tightening them up with our chilled fingers on the wooden step and heading out, tentatively at first. If you want to know the physics of how skating actually works, check here; if you want to know the physiology, tie a pair on yourself, tightly, and step onto the ice. My father called me Jellylegs when I was a kid, and I've never been a great skater (if you want to see one, look here), but I've always enjoyed the stride and the glide as you begin to fly.

The ice was good, certainly solid enough, but not perfect. In places you could see grey tracks from where someone had walked across the pond after the last snow, some parts were still rough, but at least the bubbles under the new ice were frozen hard, no moving water there, no crackling sounds. Long lines of open cracks ran all across the pond surface, joining each other in great zigs and zags, and sometimes the ice groaned or boomed under us, but we still were able to build our speed up until we were flying with the wind at our backs across stretches of a (mostly) clear smooth pond we could skate away on.

Skating back across the pond felt a bit like sailing, as if you needed to tack your way up, because straight into the wind was like trying to skate up a hill. There was plenty of room for tacking manoeuvres, however, since we had the whole pond to ourselves, and we etched our sharp tracks with those new blades all over, except for the southerly edges of the pond where the sun on the shore had warmed it up enough to show small strips of dark water. There was neither ecstasy nor oblivion in it, but there was bright sun and blue winter sky, and the lovely bulges of ice around and over the backs of the large rocks that broke the pond's surface, the pines with their red needles littering the shore, and the sensation of stretching and moving and flying on a broad reach across the pond.

Tonight there is wet snow and later rain. Tomorrow they say it will be plus ten. It is March in Nova Scotia and it will get cold again. The skates will stay in the car and we will see what happens. Until then I will hold in my mind the image of Toby, our son, on his first skate earlier this year, flying off across Papermill Lake, turning, and flying back toward us, his joy so wide and unencumbered it shone.