I noticed the stream yesterday. I notice it most days, the little stretch of stream that twists under a culvert and joins another culvert flow just to the East of Daddy Maxwells. I rarely look when bound south, but on Monday I noticed it on my way home and on Tuesday I noticed it again on that same way to that same place that is my current home but hopefully won’t be considered home for long. The stream on Monday was open, flowing ever so slowly, and while I couldn’t see from the road there were undoubtedly a few small native brown trout tailing over some shallow gravel in what was left of the current, facing the western culvert. Tuesday the stream was closed, iced over, signaling to the trout the end of fear from above, for the time being, and signaling to me that even moving water has a tendency to succumb to negative eight.
And so it went yesterday, freezing of this and freezing of that. Crews worked to clean up what was left of the front of Pesche’s Greenhouse, after a weekend fire decimated the entire retail section of that glassed institution. The lake threw off mountains and mountains of rolling steam, and with Geneva Bay locked in ice, more ice grew, and grew quickly, covering most of the water in its path from the extreme East end of the lake all the way to the Blackest of Points. There was some ice in Fontana Bay already and most in Williams Bay, and the remaining open sections spanning Conference to Cedar and back to the south shore somewhere around the South Shore Club was shrouded in those rolling, tumbling mountains of steam. It was only a matter of time.
This morning, with the temperatures moderating around ten degrees, the steam had subsided. The surface had been chilled enough to not cause such a dramatic scene, but that surface that seemed yesterday to be unable, or at least unwilling, to not yield to the freeze was just that- unfrozen. The lake survived the night, like a sick old man whose family had said their last goodbyes after dinner only to find him awake in his bed the following morning sipping orange juice and nibbling on a hospital pancake. The currents that drive that water around and around and back and forth had won the night, and the lake, for now, had some holdover water. This dawn revealed that not all was lost.
But this is how I’d normally think, and how you’d assume I’d think. Last year, I kept a vigilant watch over the lake, praying and hoping and willing it not to freeze. I wanted to boat sooner, to fish more, to find myself living in an early spring on that lake while the bays and points were still only mine to explore. That mindset was last year’s and this year’s love is ice, lots and lots of ice. The reasons for the dramatic change in my dreams are very, very selfish and equally as simple. I know, this year, that if an early spring of warmth and March sunshine arrive, I will most surely not be ready for it.
I remember winter used to be a season that stretched on forever, and ever. And then when it seemed to be nearly over that brown rat in Pennsylvania would see its shadow and winter would remain. The petulant winter would drag on and late snow would make the ground messy and late freezes would bolster the ice that wanted so badly to just melt. How I hated those winters. Today, I need some winter. Don’t take that to mean that I need sub zero temperatures, because that is not at all what I need. I need 35 degrees and a little, but not too much snow. I need time before spring arrives, time to work in a way that only winter allows.
If you’re reading this, vacation-home-less, then it’s obvious that you need this winter to drag on as well. Winter forgives and forgets and when you feel like you’re out of time winter snows and grows cold again. It gives you time. Once spring comes and spring leaves then you’re in for a summer that waits on no one. If we’re both going to be ready for summer, we both have to work now and find it in our summer loving hearts to root for the ice to win.