1990 to present, Lake Linganore, Maryland

By Lauren Hudgins

“What if you fall through the ice?” my sister and I asked. “What do we do?” This meant both “What do we do to try to save you?” and “What happens to us if you die?”

“Throw a rope attached to something on the bank. Or go for help.”

“What would you do if we fell through the ice?”

“I’d come after you in the canoe.”

I grew up in Maryland with a lake in my backyard. Maryland often gets long spells of below-freezing weather in the second half of winter, but there’s no guarantee.

We watched the ice carefully. We hated the cold, but a week of bitter cold might mean a few days of ice skating. A warm, sunny day could ruin everything.

Way up north, the water freezes over in thick, safe layers. But we were in the middle of the East Coast, where you need a bit more than an inch of ice to safely support weight. With the variable weather and the water flow, the ice could be perfect in one spot and dangerous a few feet away.

After a few days of freezing weather, it was my father’s job to go check the ice. He’d step tentatively out, inspect the area under his feet for a moment, and bounce up and down by bending his knees and shaking his body. The joints in my father’s legs barely worked, so this is his best effort at jumping. He’d then move a few feet farther out and repeat the process.

Eventually, he’d turn around and tell us to go get our skates from the furnace room. My father never fell in. By some magic I didn’t understand, he already knew how thick and firm the ice was.

Why should it be my father’s job to check the ice? It didn’t quite make sense to me. My sister and I were both so much smaller and lighter; we would be less likely to fall through. Of course, it sounds ridiculous to send a child out to see how dangerous the ice is. But a child doesn’t think this way.

I didn’t understand my father’s sense of selflessness when it came to his daughters. It was horribly clear to me that my father would die for us, and he would do it without hesitation or bitterness. He told me that I would understand if I had children one day. Throughout my childhood, my father was the most important person to me, even more important to me than I was. Imagining his death would send me into uncontrollable tears.

We moved into the house by the lake in the fall of 1990, when I was 5 years old. My mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer during the building process. She went in and out of the hospital twice between that Thanksgiving and the following April, when a very minor infection – the result of a routine teeth cleaning at the dentist – took advantage of her chemotherapy-weakened body. My mother was checked into the hospital for a third and final time.

That winter, between the glorious autumn moving in and my mother’s springtime death, was full of anxiety and fear for my little sister and me. We were in a strange new house. Our mother was fading away with a disease we couldn’t understand. And it sounded like gunshots were going off outside our house. Sometimes there would be a loud groaning sound and then a thunderous boom.

My sister and I sat, terrified, at the dinner table, staring into the cold darkness. “This is a good thing,” my father would explain this every following year. “When the ice gets very cold, it expands and cracks. This is what you are hearing.”

In the years to come, I would learn to correlate the booming sound with my father’s first venture onto the ice. Only thick ice would make such a loud sound, as the cracks traveled deep into the frozen layer. Sometimes the ice would crack while you were on it. I would learn that the thunderous booming, no matter how scary, meant you were safe. High-pitched crackling meant you should probably move to another spot as quickly as possible.

I first attempted to ice-skate the winter before my mother died. My mother was fragile and could not join us on the ice. The cancer had eaten away at her lungs and her bones. My father was too uncoordinated to teach me how to skate, so the job largely fell upon his sister and the female family friends that had rallied around my family during my mother’s illness and after her death.

I am uncoordinated like my father, so it took me years to learn. Seventeen years later, I still can’t skate backward, which even my dad can do. But like him, I am very fast. Out there, after a good freeze, there are several miles of uninterrupted natural ice. I came to love sprinting down the lake.

By high school, I was old enough to go out on the ice myself. I was trusted to gauge where the ice was weak and avoid it. The closest I have ever gotten to flying was when I was sprinting down the moonlit ice one night, and the ice pick on my secondhand figure skates caught an air bubble. I was alone that night but managed to escape with no more than bruised knees.

I cannot credit my father with teaching me how to skate. But I can credit him with teaching me when to skate. If I hear booming, I know it’s time to check the ice. If I look at a deep crack at just the right angle, I can see from the way the light catches it how deep the crack runs. And those pesky air bubbles? The ice goes at least as far down as that air bubble.

Like my father, I was double-cursed with both lousy coordination and horrible joints. My first time out on the ice was rather short and frustrating. I slipped, slid, fell, bruised, and sprained. My sorry ankles bowed outward. My father called me back to the chair he had carried down to the ice. “Your ankles are weak. We need to keep your skates very tightly laced. Try it now. Is that better?”

The next time I went out on the ice, I stayed longer. My father relaced my skates whenever my ankles started to wobble. He bought a skate key, which he used to pull laces around my ankles even tighter. As I got older, I wanted to be independent and insisted on doing up my skates myself. But the pain always made me return to the chair, asking my dad’s strong hands to keep my ankles safe.

I am 23. I hardly ever come home anymore, but I can feel the presence of my parents wherever I go. I have the soft, ineffectual hands of my mother and the weak ankles of my father. When I am home in the winter I still make my dad lace my skates. When I skate far away from home I make my male companions lace up my skates for me, and I tell them about my father.

I’m sure that it must sound a little awkward, a nostalgic Electra complex on ice. But there are many aspects of my father that I should look for in a partner. Strong hands. A keen, observant mind. And most importantly, a supportive and kind heart.

Lauren Hudgins graduated from Reed College in May 2006. She currently teaches English in Gunma, Japan.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 | Email This Post

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