Murmurous.

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.

Tom McGuane, from "Ice"

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