It is a winter midnight and we are inching our way across the ice. The vastness of the silent dark hangs over our heads and the creaking of the frozen lake beneath resonates like the floorboards of an abandoned home. There is no wind, no song from any last birds left in the cold, no light save for the moon reflected by the untouched snow. The only car on the road is the patrol van of the Police Chief. This night he will be out for another hour or so before sighing a long, thoughtful sigh, and returning home. The panopticon of ever present law will be left empty. Our little sub-engine of society out in these woods will be left unkempt. The night is natural, wild, divine, free, and unguarded. The water is expansive and seemingly infinite in its darkness. In autumn that water is painted in the dynamic yellows and deep ochres of a treeline that is seemingly mimicking the setting sun. In the spring it is fed by organic rains and teems with innumerable lives. In the summer it is lush and inviting to rampageous youth.
Those summers we usually could not wait for this lushness and so on the cusp of the heat we were the first one’s into the lake’s still stinging waters. It was only blocks from the school and so we would arrive in the mid afternoon. Still clothed for the most part we would jump or be pushed in from the farthest reaching stone dock. One summer someone rode their bike off that dock on a dare. Another summer we swam well into the night and shared cans of beer stolen from some unlocked cooler. Still another summer there were a bunch of signs up with “WARNING” written in imposing, undeniable, big red letters. In the small print it said something about pollutants. We obeyed the signs reluctantly. We saw the rashes on those that didn’t. We didn’t ask questions, and assumed there was some dusty office off somewhere working on it.
In late August of that year we saw the town cops taking down all the signs unceremoniously and the novice fisherman returning to their spots on the shores.
“If it’s safe to fish it’s safe to swim, right?” someone asked.
“Prolly. Wonder if the fish got that same shit on they skin,” was the response.
“Nah. Scales ain’t the same as skin.”
“Yeah,” we all nodded in agreement, “they ain’t the same.”
We do not remember deciding to venture out onto the ice. Usually it is thick and covered in heavy snow, though not this year. Perhaps it was this rare opportunity that caused us to go. Perhaps it was the freedom of this emptiest of nights. Perhaps it is just our imaginations wandering.
The poet Phillip Larkin writes, “If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water.” And he is right to give water this power.
In Ancient Greece before the birth of Socrates, Thales acredits water with being the fundamental element of the universe. In his writing he thinks of water as a pseudo-atomic, the material at the base of everything in the cosmos, an undercurrent to all aspects of universal mechanism, even the human soul.
In the creation myths devised by the earliest human imaginations in mesopotamia the first gods were described as having oceanic bodies. To these early people water was unbelievably powerful, both life giving and devastatingly destructive. An intrinsic variable upon which all else inevitably depended. Natural, wild, divine, cosmic, and uncontrollable.
We are pushing our luck. Bubbles shift beneath the dark ice with each of our steps, our eyes are locked to whichever foot we use to tap our next move. We can only guess how thin the ice has become and know not how deep the water is beneath us.
In australia forests are burning, scarring the face of the continent.
A hurricane destroys all semblance of civilization in Puerto Rico.
This year hundreds of people will die from cancerous water in small towns across America.
We are on the edge of the ice, looking out into
the abysmal and unknowable future.
I wonder about the way back.
I wonder if the ice will hold.
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