Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but it has carried you far.

No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.

Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when the pond was young.

These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only, while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations, and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.

New ice thus formed has a wonderful strength in proportion to its thickness. It is by no means smooth, however. The embossing of the reproductions of these pond dreams of fern and palm and plesiosaurus makes hubbles under your steel as you glide over it, though little you care for that on your first skate of the year. The embossing it is, I think, that largely gives it its strength, and though it may crack and sag beneath you as you strike out, you know that its black texture is made up of interlacing crystals that slip by one another in the bending, but take a new grip and hold until your weight fairly tears them apart.

The small boy knows this instinctively and applies it as he successfully runs “teetley-bendoes” to the amazement and terror of the uninitiated grown-ups. If you have the heart of the small boy still, though with an added hundred pounds in weight, you may yet dare as he does and add to the exhilaration born of the wine-sweet air the spice of audacity. An inch or so of transparent ice lies between you and a ducking among the fishes which dart through the clear depths, fleeing before the under water roar of your advance, for the cracks, starting beneath your feet and flashing in rainbow progress before you and to the right and left, send wild vibrations whooping and whanging through the ice all over the pond. Now the visible bottom drops away beneath you to an opaqueness that gives you a delicious little sudden gasp of fear, for you realize the depth into which you might sink; again it rises to meet you and here you may bear down and gain added impetus, for you know that the ice will be thicker in shallow water.

So you go on, and ever on. It is not wise to retrace your strokes, for those ice crystals that gave to let you through and then gripped one another again to hold you up may not withstand a second impact; nor is it wise to stop. Mass and motion have given you momentum and you have acquired some of the obscure stability of the gyroscope. You tend to stay on your plane of motion, though the ice itself has strength to hold only part of your weight. Thus the wild duck, threshing the air with mighty strokes, glides over it, held up by the same obscure force. The ice has no time to break and let you through. You are over it and onto another bit of uncracked surface before it can let go.

The day warmed a little with a clear sun but the frost that night bit deep again and the next morning the ice had nearly doubled in thickness and would not crack under any strain which my weight could put upon it. A second freezing, even though both be thin, gives a stronger ice than a single freezing of equal depth, just as the English bowmaker of the old days used to glue together a strip of lancewood and a strip of yew, or even two strips of the same wood, thus making a far stiffer bow than one made of a single piece of equivalent dimensions.

This ice was much smoother too. That evaporation which is steadily going on from the surface of ice even in the coldest weather, the crystals passing to vapor without the intervening stage of water, had worn off the embossing. The ice instead of being black was gray with countless air bubbles all through its texture. You will always find these after a day’s clear sun on a first freezing. I fancy the ice crystals make minute burning glasses under the sun’s rays and thus cause tiny meltings within its own bulk, the steam of the fusing making the bubbles; or it may be that the air with which the north wind of two days before had been saturating the water was thus escaping from solution.

It was midday of this second day of skating weather before I reached the pond. The sky was overcast, the wind piped shrill again, and there were snow-squalls about. The pond was empty and lone. I thought no living creature there beside myself, and it was only at the second call of a familiar voice that I believed I heard it. Then, indeed, I stopped and listened up the wind. It came again, a wild and lonely whistle that was half a shout, beginning on the fifth of the scale, sliding to the top of the octave, and then to a third above, and I heard it with amazement. The pond was firmly covered with young ice. Why should a loon be sitting out on it and hooting to me?