January 2021

Thick Ice

by Bill Vernon

I go back to when I hid my Schwinn Phantom bicycle and Middletown Journal bag among short bushy cedars along the gravel driveway at the Standard Oil pumping station, then soared away on skates over water that three days of zero degrees and three nights below zero had told me was as solid as the streets. On top of the pool under the Cincinnati Avenue bridge, I made circles while the traffic was roar, roar, roar, unaware of my presence, passing above me, my coat flapping like a cape, sleeves draped over my shoulders and tied together in front. Although on the edge of downtown, I was hidden in a glacier’s gift, a thousands-of-years-old gouge.

I was there despite my mother, but not to spite her. Knowing that Dave Kotte had fallen through the ice here last year, she’d made me promise not to skate on the creek this year. I’d argued that Dave had started a bonfire on the ice and the water wasn’t very deep. “Promise,” she insisted until I did. To make her feel better. She worried about everything any more, but Mom wouldn’t know, and I’d start no fires on the ice. Dave did crazy things, like driving his old Chevy convertible with its top down in weather even colder than this. Plus it really wasn’t dangerous. This was not a suicide mission. The opposite: like an attempt to affirm that life was worth living and the world had beauty. I’m still a little silly that way, many years later.

Maybe my plan comes to mind because of the season, which the pandemic is in now. I was happy-sad that day, 72 hours before Christmas Eve, having delivered papers and collected. Most of the customers who answered my knock on their doors gave me tips. Several gave me two dollars in singles and said to keep the change. The paper’s weekly price was $1.15. Others paid me with so many coins, the metal stuffed my front denim pockets and pressed against my thigh almost painfully. In my wallet were 18 one-dollar bills counting Mrs. Dougan’s three brand new ones. After I’d laid The Golden Lamb’s four papers on its counter, the manager paying his bill gave me a cup of hot chocolate. I stared at it a second — Mr. Cheapo — but said thanks, drank the cocoa in one gulp, then hurried here.

I intended to skate down the creek out of town as far as I could. It would be an adventure, odd, something no one else had ever done, at least to my knowledge. The idea had grown in me with a feeling of ingenuity and desire for discovery. The area where I lived had been cloaked in a dark pall for months, and I wanted to clean up my thinking. Experiencing the area I knew in a closer way might do that. In fact it already was doing it. I’d been excited from the idea’s first inception. I might not learn any secrets, but as had happened most of my life until now, I believed that common, ordinary things could surprise me.

I’d know exactly where I’d be at all times. Beyond the steep banks and thick trees obscuring the Route 42 side of Turtle Creek were the Glendower Home and Museum, plus three mansions where the town’s rich merchants once lived, their yards sprawling from the hilltop down to the street. The northwest side rose gradually from the creek with a floodplain full of scrubby trees and brush, then narrow streets and homes where most of my paper route was, then higher up a church and new housing developments.

The town ended and stubble cornfields started about where I flowed under the bridge on Southwest Street and passed the closed tomato cannery. Reaching there actually took over 10 minutes, not the three minutes I’d guessed. Although my distance was correct, the easy, gravity-driven half-mile glide as the hills leveled out wasn’t as simple as imagined.

The reality was that jutting rocks and natural debris on the surface slowed me, branches, sticks, pebbles, walnuts, buckeyes, but the human-made obstacles took even more time. I had to tiptoe over rip-rap and around the pilings of a railroad trestle. Then worse farther on, skirt a pond of murky water polluted with transmission fluid, oil, and other smelly gunk. I had to walk awkwardly ashore around it so my blades sank into the just partially frozen earth, which scratched and discolored my black skates, which I’d just bought for this excursion. I had to sit on a boulder and clean them as well as I could with a tee shirt and a paper bag from other debris on brush and low tree limbs. My idyllic journey wasn’t ideal, but I’d known it wouldn’t be. I’d just neglected, or more likely refused, to think about whatever might disturb my plans.

Of course the reward I sought was beyond all that, open land. Reaching there and heading farther away from town, toward the distant horizon, were long stretches of clean ice through mostly cultivated fields. I upped my speed and felt free. There was no wind to contend with except what I threw at myself moving forward, and the tingling that brought to my cheeks seemed like a reward, a charge of energy.

I screamed a few times and felt as if I were one of the animals who survived there. As if this were my natural place. Feeling more alive than I’d felt in weeks, I took pleasure in cottontail rabbits watching from the banks. In starlings flocking high on trees like dark knobs, then aware of my approach, erupting noisily and swooping aloft in wild, black, perfectly coordinated turns against the blue sky. I felt a kinship. Except that I was alone, they were doing what I was doing. I felt at home, connected with Nature’s possibilities and beauty.

Off to my left across the highway was Sherwood’s Market with six cars parked in front. My distance away put it into a broad panorama, a shingle-sided building among low, wooded hills that seemed to shelter it. Farther on, the new plant nursery on my side of the highway was almost mathematically neat, situated in old pasture-land. It had a large greenhouse that reflected the sun into my eyes. Several acres on three sides of the building contained exactly measured rows of shrubs and trees of different sizes. For some reason these two businesses impressed me as different from the farms I passed.

Farms were businesses too, but also dwellings, with red barns and other out-buildings, homes where families lived, some near the highway or the county road, some down long lanes. None close to the creek. I passed a field of horses and two of Holstein cows grazing. Some sheep grazing elsewhere. The animals heads raised as I passed and their calls accompanied the scrunches of my steel cutting into the ice. This was my private, self-guided tour, and though I’d basically seen it all before, I hadn’t experienced it as I was now from this intimate perspective.

When the creek turned more directly south, the setting sun made me squint and look away. It was a warning: I couldn’t go as far as I’d wished. I’d have to return soon to be able to see the obstacles on the way back. I congratulated myself, that was mature thinking, but proceeded on because I was enjoying the trip so much. When the creek bent more left, eastward toward its union with the Little Miami River, suddenly it and I fell into deep shadows, following a route along the base of a steep hill. Seeing the creek ahead cross under the highway shocked me. I was already over two miles from town. Alarmed by the shadows, I turned back, moving more purposefully with the dying light.

The thought occurred to me that skating was a game. It was like playing with the elements, adjusting to them. Moving forward around obstacles was part of living. All the way back, skating like this, God seemed to be playing with me, and that made me feel proud. Obstacles were opportunities. Using my own energy, concentration, balance, and other skills was letting me respond to Nature successfully.

Coming and going I knew where I was because I’d visited the areas around my home walking. Skating past the nursery I remembered the place where my brother-in-law, just playing around, said, “See that crow. Watch this.” He pulled his father’s German Luger from its holster, fired from the hip, and the distant bird fell. We were amazed. Retrieving it, Frank said, “I didn’t think I’d hit it.” Neither did I. I didn’t like killing things for recreation either. This incident among many eventually convinced me to quit hunting altogether.

The railroad track alongside the creek a bit farther along was where, hunting rabbits, I’d met a man who said he was born on a southern plantation, the son of slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation. He was, he said, hunting as African natives hunted, with a throwing stick, and he joked that using my .20 gauge shotgun was not fair to God’s critters. I didn’t think he could take one with a simple dowel rod wrapped in tape with a ball of lead on one end, but he took a sitting rabbit that day. Nearer town, the little tributary creek I passed ran alongside my house, and from it I had taken six snapping turtles. Friends of mine liked to make turtle soup.

Friendships were on my mind approaching the Southwest Street bridge. I was in contented, deep thought when someone yelled my name. There was Dave leaning over a rail, his roadster parked nearby, its lights on, its top down. “Your mom told me you’d be here skating.

I laughed. “She said that?”

“Yeah. It’s Saturday, man. Want to go get a cup of coffee and something to eat?”

“I have to get my bike at Standard Oil.”

“I’ll meet you. We’ll load it in the trunk and take it home, then go to Frisch’s. Your mom said it’d be okay.”

“Sounds good.” I continued to my bicycle amazed that my mother knew so much more than I’d thought. Grateful for it and for Dave too.

Delivering the Cincinnati Times-Star newspaper, Dave’s route overlapped mine and so we often met. We were altar boys at the St. Francis de Sales Church and had attended grade school together at St. Susanna’s in Mason five miles away, close to my meandering creek.

I realize now that his friendship helped me. The unexpected loss of my father had greatly disrupted my family and caused anxiety and confusion in me. Before that, the world seemed solid and benevolent. Perhaps Dave recognized that year’s Christmas as the first we’d have without Dad. In the ‘50s, the people I knew, even my own family, didn’t often speak about such things, but I think Dave’s friendship and my mother’s love were as natural a gift as the fresh air I breathed, skating through the countryside. An elemental need, a solace of the most human kind.

Death such as the pandemic has brought? It reminds me of what I sometimes try to forget, that such a demise is always present. My skating story tells me death’s possibility is beyond human control, that it is unavoidable, an obstacle no one skates past. The old memento mori idea. I learned back then that it also helps me love more deeply the good things I have.

Bill Vernon, retired teacher in Dayton, Ohio, has published poems, short memoir stories, and fiction on golfing, running, canoe racing, playing baseball, fishing, piano playing, hunting, international folk dancing, and walking. As you may have guessed, he spends a lot of leisure time these days reminiscing in print about those activities.