I might prefer the lake in winter. I come here for the quiet, the solitude–the empty houses breathing just enough to keep the pipes unfrozen. Summer detritus robed in snow lies scattered at the edge of plains of ice. The wind carves her waves atop the frozen water.
One morning I gathered my courage and curiosity and stepped out onto the frozen lake for the first time. It was slidey, completely smooth underneath my boots. The snow crunched like dust and gravel scattered across its moonlike surface, smarting my eyes with day’s glare. Leaving the paternal bulk of the hemlock trees at the shore felt like pulling apart two magnets–I felt exposed, naked under the brilliant sky, unarmored despite the layers of wool and fleece. I struggled to recall when last I felt laid bare like this, and willingly.
In time I arrived at the center of the lake–or at least, the midpoint between each shore, furthest from land. I stopped and allowed the crunch-slide-tap of my steps to recede from my ears. The world was silent, the land distant. Not one bird wheeled through the frosted sky. I had an odd sense of vertigo; my body was perhaps trying to reconcile how I came to be standing where there was no earth. In summer months I would have floated here. Experimenting, I bent one knee, then the other, then with mittened palms flat to the ice I unfolded to lie facedown. Straining my ears to hear any crack, straining my eyes for silver faultlines, I brushed the snow away and peered down into the frozen water.
I expected opaque disappointment, and at first that is what I received. The ice was grey and gold, and gleamed dully in the soft winter sunlight. Its surface was Egyptian glass–thousands of years old, slightly pitted, corroded by the air bubbles trapped within. The proximity of the ice stole the moisture and warmth from my breath so quickly, I felt as though I was breathing the ice itself. Shadows and shapes resolved themselves more clearly the longer I looked, blinking, into the darkness beneath. The wet bite of cold began sinking its teeth into my belly and thighs as I lay. My mind drifted.
It was easy to lay there, so unlike my outside life. Out there I felt as if in a crucible with heat and pressure applied on all sides–the imperative towards decisions of action and movement. Everything must be intervened upon, pushed forward, squeezed through smaller and smaller tubes in order to engender more speed. Laying here was a decision of ultimate passivity and anathema to any sort of transformative process. My body attempted a shiver and I bore down against it and relaxed my abdomen against the still skin of the lake. Belly to belly, as intimate and vulnerable as possible, preventing protective contraction. My thoughts tumbled weightless as snow, disconnected and growing more distant and abstract as the cold bloomed through my body. My eyes lose their focus. What a leisurely span between blinks!
Almost insensate to the outside in this state, the flicker beneath the ice nearly escaped me but for the finger of awareness that I still held extended. Like heaving an anchor, I pulled my senses to attention, perceiving only a mere wingbeat of light-dark, dark-light beneath me. A fish, perhaps? But in that movement there was a great sensation of distance confused by the closeness of the ice, inches from my nose. The reptilian movement of a fish was profoundly unexpected in the stillness of the world out here. I peered through the glass with renewed curiosity.
The flicker again! A dark shape. Wavering more like fabric than fish. The sight confounded me and I shifted back and forth, angling my head, trying to make sense of such a motion. Currents of water moving trapped air against the ice’s underside? Floating aquatic grasses that had escaped the paralysis of winter?
As if a great eye opened beneath me, I saw the underneath world yaw wide. Vertigo intensified and my breath caught. Winter’s sunlight unfolded, fractaled across minute and vague details which unfurled into moving shapes. Light and shadow inverted, then returned, a photo negative immersed in its solution. Monochromatically an image revealed itself to me, illuminating beneath the stretch of my body.
A veritable city of people teemed under the water and ice there. As tiny and perfect as figurines, as beautiful as art, they had burst into unselfconscious quotidian life before my eyes. Streets flowed with beings, in tiny carriages, on miniscule bicycles. Their dress was as if for autumn and in congruence with the freezing temperatures I was feeling. My breath caught in my throat, I blinked and squinted: the city remained. I peered down at it from above, amazed. From chimneys spilled smoke, from shops spilled people. The raucous bustle of a winter market, smoked meat and candied fruit and burning wood all colored the air, chaos and color.
And it was a curious relationship with gravity down there–most of the people remained hurrying along the streets, feet on the cobbled streets, but sometimes doors opened halfway up a tiny building and their occupants would step out into nothing, only to gently sink to street level and continue on their way afoot as if it might be improper to remain suspended. Fish were hitched to posts and poles like steeds, some bearing fantastically dressed riders and fanciful saddles. I watched a near-collision of brook trout with a bluespotted sunfish, hysteria and indignation. Peacock frocks dismounted in a flurry and hashed out the details, witnessed by a nearby cider-cart nearly upended in the confusion. A little drama that started sour but ended sweet with a round of cider in thimble-size quantities bought for all.
I cast my eye further across the city. Sculptures and fountains demarcated broad palazzos and city blocks. Every building was festooned with gargoyles and trellises, many with balconies or whole floors open to the surrounding atmosphere, with pathways for people crossing, far above the streets. There were several magnificent structures that appeared to be pyramidal temples illuminated with bioluminescent algae stuffed into sconces. The colors of the city were difficult for me to discern–at first, all seemed the color of ice, the sharpness of a silver plate photograph. Then I would blink to reveal rich blues, yellows, warm oranges and reds, shining like mica, burning bright afterimages into my eyes.
I stared down at the city for an indeterminate period. Only when my hands and face threatened damage from the cold did I tear my eyes away, blinking frozen moisture out of my eyelashes. My body convulsed, causing my teeth to click uncontrollably, finally remembering the harshness of the world against my will. Perhaps the sun had moved–I could not tell. I stiffly made my way back to the shore, hands tucked into my armpits against the chill and my violent shivering. Was it a hallucination? A fantasy to keep me from the cold? A dream brought on by stress and now my abrupt, absolute isolation?
I had a little time left at the lake house to consider. Kettle on, wet clothes off, painful life burning in my red hands and legs. I sat for a time, eyes closed against any new sights and against the familiar shapes of the house. Painstakingly I catalogued each and every person, building, fish, conversation I had seen. I compared them to the real. I found the real wanting.
2025