He’s eight today. Eight! I have shoes younger than him!
What were you doing eight years ago today? I remember what I was doing: having my world redefined by nine pounds of boy.
Let’s list some examples that show just how long eight years really is.
Eight years is:
- Thirty-two seasons of The Anna Nicole Smith show
- Eight World Series without the Red Sox
- Two terms of President Clinton
- Over $50 million in steam-cleaning fees for the White House during the above
- About long enough to start considering an Air Supply reunion
- 12 Jennifer Lopez marriages
- Still not enough time for me to finish college
Last week, I went driving around on a lake.
No, I do not have a Jesus Car that can drive on water, spinning donuts that create little whirlpools of holy exhaust. What I do have is the luck to live in an arctic winter climate that freezes smaller bodies of water like the biggest damned Frigidaire you’ve ever seen. And thanks to the persistent chill, the ice on Maine’s lakes and ponds is thicker than it’s been in well over a decade.
My drive home from work takes me past Echo Lake, a beautiful glacier-formed lake nestled between two of the larger mountains on my side of the island. The boys and I go swimming in this lake in the summer, watching ducks steal food from other bathers and chasing little fish through the water grasses. But in wintertime, those little fishies are walled off from the world like an unfortunate Edgar Allen Poe character by winter’s masonry.
Instead of halting human activity on the lake until the spring, however, the ice actually convinces people to drive their pickup trucks — laden with wooden shacks and dragging trailers of snowmobiles behind — to the shores for ice fishing. Ice fishing! The bucolic monotony of fishing combined with potential frostbite and carbon monoxide poisoning! Truly the sport of kings. And, adding to the danger, many of these outdoorsmen will not simply drive to the edge of the water with their cargo, but will: drive onto the water, park in the middle of the lake/pond/puddle, set up their shacks, and live there until the ice begins to make the kind of sound you’re used to hearing from your old Led Zeppelin LP’s on a turntable.
I’m not the type of person who aspires to camp upon 12 inches of a substance that I could drink if I took it a few hundred miles south. I am, however, the type of person that enjoys the occasional brush with disaster — like picking fights with bigger people, or voting for a Democrat (I was young and foolish once). So last Thursday, I drove down the access road at Ikes Point, stopped at the boundary between earth and, well, solid something-else, then crept slowly onto the ice.
And I drove to the middle of the lake, the exact spot that I swim to in August. I stopped the car, closed my eyes, and dreamed about summer amidst a wind chill of thirty below. Parked right over some of the same little fish that my boys will chase in a few months, trusting my limited knowledge of the weak force of physics that bound the molecules under my vehicle, I thought of nothing besides the very warmth that would unmake the platform that made this activity possible.
I drove onto the ice to destroy it. I can’t wait.
What kind of a man yells at his fish? His little goldfish, floating about in a new reality every eleven seconds? What kind of cold-hearted bastard yells at an itty-bitty fishy?
Answer: a man who desperately needs to travel to a big city sometime soon.
Um, not that I’d know or anything.
Lot’s of updates in progress.
First of all, Cold Comfort Farm was the runaway winner in the Name My House contest. A late entry, however, very nearly shut down the contest by its simplicity and grace. Instead of unilaterally declaring the contest over and destroying the constitutional fabric that holds the Internet together, I decided to let the people’s choice fight it out mano a mano against the late arrival. New poll awaits your vote in the upper left hand corner of this most wondrous blog.