David LeGault
An annual sled dog race across Northern Michigan and portions of Lake Michigan ends in tragedy when a musher goes beneath the ice while attempting to save his drowning dogs. He manages to push both animals out of the fissure before his body gives in to the cold. The dogs are found the next morning, alive and well.
*
A man from Gladstone, Michigan falls through the ice on his way to go fishing. His house faces the lakeshore, the death occurring less than a quarter mile from the man's front door. Picture the wife, the infant child, the collective gaze over the cool white distance, searching for a crack where their lives forever changed. They’ll never find it; the spot iced over in a matter of hours. Soon, spring will arrive and all proof of descent will forever be erased.
*
I begin training in the middle of a cold front, a day when the wind chill clocks in at twenty below, the condensation of my breath collecting on my facial hair in a gritty beard of frost. This is my new home, Minneapolis, an unfamiliar city that's colder than anything I've known. At its worst, the sweat collects on my eyelashes, icing tops and bottoms together, my eyes in a permanent squint until I rub it away between gloved fingers. Somehow, this feels important: the search for identity through physical strain, the exploration of an iced-over world.
*
Water reaches its highest density around 4°C, causing cooling water to sink, displacing its depths. Once uniform temperature is achieved, water on the surface may then freeze, pinning oxygen underneath. If not for this natural process, this anomalous expansion, ice would not form on the surface; lakes would freeze from the bottom up; we could not venture across their unsteady surfaces. Here, we begin to see the cold bringing out uncharacteristic properties, the unnatural in nature, the errata page, the asterisk.
*
A breaker vessel forces shipping lanes open by tearing through the iced skin of Lake Michigan. Admire the trail of open water—the dark depths battling against the cataract white of the snow-coated surface, bleeding out. The ship is designed to push ice away from the hull, to use its intense weight and momentum to destroy what was created by the cold. The boat uses special weights and counterweights designed for collision. Few people know that the ship is dependent on the ice’s obstruction. Even the smallest waves on an open sea could force it to capsize.
*
Hundreds of yards of nylon rope are spliced into a continuous strand, channeled through a system of pulleys running up and down the slope. Skiers grip the moving lines between frozen fingers, propelling themselves up the hill. Gloves are wrapped thick with duct tape, the only protection from rope burns through the fabric. I’m working my first job—operating these towropes at a ski resort in Michigan—learning the boredom of repetition, what it means to watch others be entertained for six hours at a time. Here is where I watch the ropes carve deep grooves in the groomed snow—deep enough to catch the tip of a ski, to trip the inexperienced face first into blistering rope. The friction from the moving line against snow creates an icy rut that runs up the surface of the hill, and I spend half my shift shoveling fresh now into the track, trying to bury the inevitable danger, failing.
*
Why do I find myself attracted to the cold, to this cold, to a cold where the body no longer survives? Why do I mythologize the fall beneath the ice, the slowing of the beating heart, hypothermic?
*
The weight of clothing does not drag the body down. It's the restriction of movement (the inflexibility of a rubber boot, the stiff-armed swim of all those layers) that makes the surface unreachable. Even if we make it to the opening, layers of fabric will hold the wetness close to the skin. Death sets rapidly in moisture’s loving swaddle.
*
Patches of skin on my back and ankles are gradually turning raw—dead and dry from exposure to these inhuman temperatures. I'm alone out here, and despite the cold, there's a pleasure in finding the typically busy streets vacant. When I get home, the exposed skin holds a fleeting itching sensation, a minutiae of feeling before my body warms and the flesh goes numb. I won't feel again until my body is pushed back into the world it wholeheartedly rejects.
*
Ice as creation: a revisional shaping into matter of substance, into crystalline order, lacking in density.
*
Ice as destruction: the expansion of the freeze, bursting pipes, weakening stone.
*
Out on the ice, I know a guy who keeps a space heater humming along with a television connected to a portable generator. I see countless ice shacks perched on the Lake Michigan's frozen shelf. Fishermen auger holes, keeping the water exposed with their coiling drills. From the shore, I make educated guesses as to what's happening within the shacks spread before me: hard, destructive drinking among the curling smoke from wood-tipped Swisher Sweets. High school boys glaze over in obscene drug consumption, staring into the water as it closes up in stitches. It’s no wonder that countless shacks go through the ice each year, men waiting too long to retreat, until the ice becomes unstable, until they have no choice but to abandon their dwellings to the splintering sheet. I look out to the bay, hoping to watch the shanties go beneath the re-emerging current.
*
Skaters don’t glide on ice, but a thin layer of water.
*
And so I run onto the ice, racing across a small park lake in the heart of Minneapolis. I go in a straight shot across the center of the body, knowing that its depths go far above my head. I have faith in the ice’s strength—the subzero temperatures of the past two weeks all but ensure my safety—but still I proceed quickly. I can’t help it; that the surface underneath is temporary, that the cold creates its own structure, that its normal state could never support my weight. Still, the loneliest part of me needs to know its limits, to discover its breaking point.
*
I press my cheek against the frozen, clear sheet. I feel the tingle of smooth skin colliding with a slick chill that’s harder than me. If I stay long enough the ice will melt under my warmth. If I stay longer still, my body will form into the cold, absorb into its mass.
*
Absolute Zero, our theoretical low, −273.15° C. Just as machines cannot achieve perfect efficiency, our nadir can never be achieved. God knows we’ve tried: Laser cooling, cryogenics, quantum physics, the nuclear spin. In the laboratory we’ve come within a billionth of a degree of the benchmark. As we approach perfection, elements stop obeying natural laws: they revert to chaotic bursts of implosion; superconductivity; they flow up hills; they climb containing walls. We’re no longer talking about unfathomable cold, we’re looking at the death of the atom, the absence of reality.
*
Imagine a glacier in the late Cenozoic age—the immense force of cold dragging across the northern Midwest. It carves through soft shale and limestone in its cross-country shamble, eroding bedrock in its glacial scour. In its wake the landscape is revised; deep basins of Ordovician stone remaining under all this mass. Take notice of how only the hardest, unforgiving matter remains, how the glacier eradicates all weakness from the region, scattering its moraines across the countryside.
*
For the first time in weeks, a brief reprieve. Several days above the melting point, patches of yellowed grass emerging from beneath the melting snow. As I run the shoreline, I notice the recently placed warnings: Do Not Pass: Ice Not Safe. This time, I take to the ice, run onto the volatile surface, pick my spot, and jump.