Ice.

An excerpt from The Tom McGuane short story "Ice" found in the collection of short stories titled, Gallatin Canyon.

In January, Lake Erie froze nearly to Canada. One evening, standing before its ominous expanse in my ice skates, with a wool cap pulled over my ears and a long scarf wound around my neck and crisscrossed over my chest beneath my blue Navy-surplus pea jacket, I left the shore. I planned to face down the spectre of my fear by going as far as I dared toward Canada, or the Livingston ship channel if the icebreaker had been through. I hoped that my love of skating would propel me through the worst of my worries.

I struggled over the corrugations of the shore ice, and then ventured onto smoother, glassier terrain that rewarded me with long glides. I could see bubbles below me, and the white bellies of upended perch and rock bass. I began to dream of landing in Canada, on that foreign shore from whence, according to Mrs. Andrews, the redcoats had once launched sorties against our Colonial heroes. I began to imagine a visit to the old British fort at Amherstburg. I would skate home with tales of imperial ghosts and whatever other secret existences I might discover in those places where only the most courageous ventured. I would tell Mrs. Andrews what I had done. These dreams enlivened my skating, and I raced on, stroke after stroke. One day, years afterward, I would come to view this night as the template for the many disasters I later created for myself, but, at the time, risking my life in the gathering darkness on a day when I had cowered at the thought of a paper cut or an infected pimple produced no awareness of contradiction. I felt only the allure of the hard, perfect ice, cold-snap ice unblemished by wind during its formation. It was impossible for me to imagine the drum major out here in his shako like an animated Q-tip—there would be no prancing among the crows and ice-killed fish for him, I gloated.

I kept going. If I turned back, I told myself, if I let the falling dark turn me back, I would never be any good and the fog of cowardice would envelop me forever.

The ice seemed to rise before me and disappear into the twilit sky, as though they were one and the same. The lights that had shone briefly on the shore were gone now, and I had yet to see my first Canadian light or the outlines of the fort. I reached for the old compass in my pocket.

When I stopped to reconnoitre, I felt the cold penetrate and I adjusted my scarf. It was time to go home, and I knew it, but I couldn’t leave at the first wave of panic. I would press on into the blackness just long enough to prove that it was I who had elected to return and not those forces which were always rendering me worthless in my own eyes. Such thoughts produced an oddly inflexible gait in my skating; I reached my feet stiffly through a space that I couldn’t confirm with my eyes. Suddenly, the sound of my blades, which had seemed to fill the air around me, was replaced by another, more murmurous tone, like a church congregation heard from afar. I was gliding toward the sound when a vast aggravation of noise and physical turbulence erupted and a storm of ducks took flight in front of me: it was water. The lake heaved a gloomy sigh, and I found myself, after some minutes of agitated effort, almost at the edge of the ice. I skated off in a panic, and when I was once more standing squarely on black ice I stopped and recognized that I was lost. A step in any direction and I could drown in freezing water. I was becoming claustrophobic, too—I had an incongruous sense of airlessness, as though I’d been locked in a windowless room. I knew that I was going to die.

I lashed out first at my own entangling fantasies—the hated redcoats, the pursuing ostrich—and then at death itself. My bowels began to churn, and I squatted on the ice with the pea jacket over my head, my pants around my knees. I recited the Lord’s Prayer in a quavering voice. I was answered: a deep, rhythmic throb gathered slowly into a rumble. A light emerged from the blackness in front of me, followed by several others, until they formed a line streaming toward me like comets. Then, just as the sound was at its most intense, an enormous black shape rose before me, causing the ice to groan. It was not the god I had expected. The lights streamed away and all was silent again. A freighter bound for Lake Superior.

I extracted the compass from my pocket and began to bargain with death. It took some concentration to rotate the battered brass case until I had north pinned down; then, staring at the cloudy glass held almost under my nose, I began to skate as rapidly as I could, placing all my faith in the ornate “W.” I moved fast on the cold mirror beneath me, creating my own wind, knowing that if the compass was faulty after all its years in the ground I would skate straight off the ice into a world from which I would not return. But a kind of faith conveyed from the freighter god to the compass kept me peering into my cupped hands as I pressed on with all I had. In a short time I could make out some shapes in my path, fishermen’s shanties—a series of small houses positioned over round holes spudded through the ice, through which the occupants could angle for perch or hang for hours, iron spear in hand, to await the great pike, drawn to them by a hand-whittled wooden perch decoy. By night, these shacks were all deserted.

But one shanty revealed a flickering light, and to it I attached all my hopes. At its door, I made out voices, and I stopped before knocking. They were voices from my classroom, and I listened, as if dreaming, to what sounded like a quarrel. First, the drum major, his voice cocky, bantering. The other seemed to plead and whimper, and was, of course, Mrs. Andrews. And then there were different sounds, less precise than words. I skated off as silently as I could, afraid that if they caught me they would have to do something terrible to me, whether they wanted to or not. I had no business knowing what I knew.

I hit land a long way from where I’d put on my skates, and I was obliged to traverse a considerable distance tottering on my blades across pickerelweed and pebbles, waving my arms for balance, while thanking everything around me for the continuation of my days on earth. But, in a scrap of tangled beech woods, my pious thoughts soon crumbled beneath a lurid, new vision, something as dark as the woods around me. It was as if, as I conquered one fear, another had risen to take its place—even more daunting than the last.

Light from the small houses that lined the narrow road to the shore made wild shadows in the leafless trees. I heard dogs barking behind closed doors, and one homeowner let his beagle out while watching me from his doorway. I tried to manage my movements, but there was no way to walk normally, nor any way for an observer to see that I was wearing skates. The beagle approached to within ten feet of me and sat down, emitting a single reflective bark as I passed its lawn. The owner remained in the doorway and watched me pass in silence. I gave him a little wave, which he didn’t return.

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