Can
I share something briefly? It includes a suggestion for a “right” word
for ice, specifically, as in the examples cited, deep hard river ice.
In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, before the very biggest ore ships
began arriving to feed the automotive machine at River Rouge. The
Detroit River, fast flowing south from Lake St Clair,
down to Detroit, and thence to Lake Erie, presented a fascinating
challenge to Detroit boys. The river froze deep and hard — let me call
it black steel, it was truly that hard, and, at night, that color.
But in the very center, the freighter channel almost almost never
completely froze because of the current, leaving a fearsomely fast
stream of subzero water not wide enough for trade but wide
enough to suggest an exciting game for depression era boys.
All along the river, from Peche Island off Windmill Point in Detroit,
south to Belle Isle athwart East Detroit, and then all the way down to
the Ambassador Bridge, connecting Canada and the US, rugged little
hockey playing punks, from ten to sixteen years old, would compete with
each other in skating as fast as they could toward the widest breaks in
the river ice they could find, daring each other to try wider and wider
gaps, and then leaping with all their strength, flying over the rushing
gap to land on their skates on the other side on pure unscarred ice the
color of onyx. And then, gathering strength and speed in a wide,
arm-swinging loop, they would leap back. If they made it, applause and
a hand-rolled cigarette or a gulp of schnapps. If not, the cold shut
their consciousness down quickly (I have since learned), and below the
surface the brutishly powerful current would drag the boys away from
the relatively small opening they had leapt. They would be quickly be
frozen hard, and usually not found until spring. Sometimes as far
downriver as Lake Erie. Each and every winter, for a couple of decades,
a scandalous number of the toughest and most daring kids in the city
met death this way. The newspapers railed but no one -- cops, teachers,
parents — did much to stop them.
Finito. A true story. Both my father and my wife’s father did this as
kids and she and I both had this story told to us as kids. To my wife
as a cautionary tale; from my father, I suspect, as a suggestion for
when I complained about having nothing to do. Compare this with Woolf’s
surrealistic boating disaster in which a dinghy full of apple sellers
and tortoises managed to pull a Titanic in the middle of some Brit
puddle. But I enjoy Woolf’s work and am not knocking her, and the tears
begin to well up when I imagine the boat going down and the tortoises
and apple sellers fighting over life jackets and the crew playing
“Nearer My God To Thee.”
Just kiddin. You know I love you guys.
Andrew “Buttinski” Brown