I go alone to Kimball Lake, where I’m told the ice is solid. I don’t have the right gear or the right clothing. I’m short ice picks and a parka with a hood that will keep me warm in the fifteen degree weather. I pull up to an empty parking lot at the boat landing which is covered with wolf tracks in a dusting of snow.
I bring my life jacket, a funny little boot pull that I’m imagining I could use as an ice pick, and skates down to the landing. The ice is startlingly clear, but notably thicker than any other ice I’ve been on so far this year. It is the cracks that tell me the ice is four to six inches thick. Smooth, perfect ice would be impossible to decipher. Look for the cracks: the wrinkles that show some age, the stretch marks that show some growth.
The ice is singing, a deep metallic twang that comes and goes. I skate slow, taking my time traversing new areas, not confident in any ice, looking for the tracks of other skaters who have been this way. The ice is so clear I feel like I am hovering in space, walking on water, balancing between nothing and everything. On the bottom of the lake I see dead minnows and fallen trees and trash. In the ice I see bubbles, which make me laugh with joy, and those deep cracks telling me I am strong enough to hold you and whatever you carry today.The first ice of the year was early, at the beginning of November. My friends, ambitious and knowledgeable and geared to the gills with safety equipment, find a hidden lake that has “safe” ice.
With wild ice, safe means different things to everyone. For some, an inch or two is enough. For me, I will skate on three but feel a thrill of fear the whole time. Four or more and my shoulders relax, I let my guard down.
Tia and Margaret have already been all the way across and back, found it safe, but it still takes me a little while to get used to the feeling. The ice is impenetrably black. The blades of my skates cut the void.
“Come on!” yells Tia from the middle of the lake in her Tennessee accent we all adopt as our own after hanging out with her for any length of time. “It’s wild ice season, get used to the idea of dying!”
She’s kidding, but also not. Soon I am convinced, and we skate across the middle of the lake, which always scares me but I’m told is safer than the edges. And it’s hard to describe the feeling that occurs when you finally let go, give in to being suspended above such depths. It’s flying and sinking and euphoria and dread all at once.
My friends are growing up. Two of the best turned twenty-nine and twenty-eight in the span of a few days. They are now the age I was when I moved to this town on the edge of Lake Superior and met them. I mark their age with disbelief. “It’s my last time seeing you when you’re … 27?” I say to Kjersa, the question mark not because I don’t know she’s turning 28 tomorrow, but because it seems impossible that she has aged at all since I met her five years ago, and therefore impossible that I have either.
When I was 28 I made the big move north to our little town. I changed absolutely everything about my life. Will they do something wild too? Will I lose them to an existential crisis, the need for a massive shift? I hold this possibility for them, knowing how much I needed it at that time in my own life and how good it was to uproot myself. I also selfishly hope theirs looks different, with fewer miles of distance needed for them to keep finding themselves.I race to meet everyone at Two Island Lake on a day of good ice. The urgency of wild ice is real: conditions don’t always align so that the lakes freeze over before the snow falls, and after they freeze any snowfall in the forecast could mean the skateable ice gets buried.
When I arrive, the parking lot is full. I immediately get a rush of joy and panic seeing the ice pocked with people, as though if I don’t hurry the ice will be gone or the experience usurped by someone else. As I lace up my skates, Tia comes skating from across the bay to fetch me and points me to the little group of people out on the ice past the bumpy pressure ridge we need to trip over to get to the good ice.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” she says, and I am so filled with warmth at the thought that they waited that I almost cry.
The ice on Two Island is black, so black I wouldn’t know the thickness if I laid down on my belly and peered into it (as Kjersa does). But others have gone before, today and days before, and it’s been cold. The cold doesn’t guarantee stability: there is a patch of open water we give a wide berth, a reminder that, like time, the surface on which we skate is always changing, never a guarantee.
We skate into the wind, pelted by snow, knowing that the way back will be easier and warmer. At the end of the lake we gather and play, doing little tricks and giggling at ourselves. Eventually, hands and toes numb from the cold, we fly back, buoyed by the wind behind us. For this moment we are cold and wild, perfectly suspended together in the exact same time and space.I wish I could wait for them to catch up to me, to stop my own aging so we go through the same phases at the same time. In many ways I subconsciously do so, living like I’m still in my mid-twenties instead of fully embracing being 35, which still feels significant and new. In many ways I often act even younger than them: I drink more, stay out just as late or later, don’t have a “real job” like they do.
But maybe being the oldest friend is a gift, a sacred responsibility. I get to travel through these years ahead of them. I can test the ice they’ll be traversing for safety, call out to them when it gets thin. And maybe, if I get wiser, show them where to hold on, and where it’s safe to let go.
This is so beautiful Emily, I really enjoyed reading this! I've been the oldest friend in the group and both the youngest friend in the group, and it's always such a different feeling, but this is such a lovely perspective on it❤️
So many nuggets of wisdom here 🥹🤍