By Gary Lee Parker
Express Writer
Note: This is taken from a series of first-person articles by Gary Lee Parker who writes about the outdoors and the America's rich history. “The water is crying. It doesn't want to freeze over...freezing is death,” she says, sitting on the bank with her feet on a rock piercing through the slowly thickening layer of ice. “It's angry about the coming winter.”
We sit slightly unnerved and silent for several desolate moments, feeling the motion of the earth hurtling noiselessly through the vast wasteland of a blackened cosmos. Mars and Venus are dancing low in a western sky awash in cerulean and salmon. “I think it's singing; I think it's happy,” I say without conviction. Then brightening I add, “It loves the winter as much as it loves the summer.”
A sudden rushing fills the night, like wind in a forest canopy, but low and ambiguous, within the ice, growing louder until it drowns all else away before abruptly ebbing to nothing. Then two loud pops, like weak gunshots, pass by as though they had every right to so rudely intrude. Then nothing.
The trees on the horizon streak reflections in the icy glaze that covers the lake as the pink sky turns to gray. My friend begins scribbling emotion onto the pages of a small leather-bound writing book she holds in gloved hands, and I drift off into thought, remembering other times I've heard the ice-song, let its haunting melody lick around the peripherals of my mind.
I was young the first time I heard it. Like hearing a wolf in the wild, it chilled me to the bone and stopped me in my tracks. I was sure it was a gunshot from the bowels of the earth, some daemon searching me out for vengeance, and my heart pounded deep in my little boy's chest. It came again, then again, then again, sounding slightly different each time, but eerily the same. Crack! Then a long, low howl as if a great blue whale lay suffering on some desolate seafloor. Mostly I remember the fear.
My dad had explained to me that it was just the ice expanding and contracting, and sometimes cracking, with the changing temperature – science has an answer for everything, it seems – but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was something less benign, something other-worldly. Spirits whispering to one another, perhaps, or lost souls crying out for direction.
I've heard it many times since that first unsettling encounter. Each time is different from the one before. Each time is as surreal as the last. Tonight is no exception.
A strange singing whine pulls me from my thoughts, depositing me back on the lakeshore. Browne Lake. The eastern edge of the Uintah range. And it is bitter cold and getting colder every minute. I've wrapped up in winter clothes and my friend bears a fur-lined trapper hat and gloves with the finger-tips cut away, I assume for easier writing. She winces a bit at the spectral sound and looks to me for assurance. This is her first time hearing the crying ice, and she's as unconvinced of my explanation as I was of my father's.
The unearthly song echoes up and down the lake, glancing off the mountains that dam the water in and reverberating along the shore. The ice at our feet shudders and cracks making a low pop-pop-popping sound, and then the sound of some bizarre lost and alien loon drifts across the ice. Real, but not real. I shudder.
“It's beautiful,” I venture.
“It's the old ice that's patient, singing the slow mourning song,” says my friend. “The young ice is angry and rebellious.”
“It's beautiful,” I repeat.
“Yes,” she says.
I read somewhere that the thickness of the ice, and the depth of the water below it, determine what sound it produces. On large lakes the ice can be deep and strong and the forces at play are immense. When enough pressure builds the ice gives way and a harsh crack can spread across the surface for hundreds of yards, or even miles, and the whole lake shudders with the sound of cannon-fire.
On smaller lakes, early in the days of winter when the ice is just beginning to form, like this lake today, cracks travel quickly, rushing across the surface with the sound of the seashore or a distant cheering crowd. The popping is lower, quieter, less like gun-play than like a mallet against sand. You can feel it as much as hear it. You can feel it with all your senses.
A long, enchanting lament seeps up from the depths of the lake, stealing its way along the edges of the horizon, like a shadow that has broken free of its corporeal moorings; like a wraith hunting among the unsuspecting living. It builds to a low rushing hiss, punctuated by bursts of energy, a vacillating volume and pitch that imbue the experience with the feeling of sentiment and meaning, almost of language. The apparitions speak to each other of things long since lost to mankind, and my friend an I listen, trying to understand.
“The wind is in the water,” she says.
“The wind is in the water,” I echo.
She begins writing again.