Ice.

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.

Skate on here.