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Fear is necessary to survival and creeps into our human behaviours in imaginative ways. Take for example my sister-in-law, who insisted that her four children wear life jackets over their ski jackets while skating on our lake's hockey rink. She enjoyed peace of mind while they had hours of fun.
Once every few years, a blessed combination of winter rainfall followed by a sudden snowless cold snap transforms our entire lake into a sheet of smooth glittering ice – a skater's dream. As I look out through our front window at nature's gift, my freer nature is already there, racing across the frozen surface. My heart is lit up like an ice crystal dancing with a ray of sun.
My husband has gone down with an axe to cut a hole in the ice. "We're good to go," he says. "The ice is six inches deep." Six inches from a much colder version of an element in which I, not too long ago, did the breast stroke, buoyant thanks to a combination of co-ordinated movements, my feminine adornment of body fat and a measure of faith.
My faith somehow didn't extend to this frozen element separating me from the frigid liquid below.
An emotionally charged image from Alistair MacLeod's wonderful book No Great Mischief surfaces hauntingly in my consciousness. The main character, Alexander MacDonald, is left an orphan after his parents and brother fall through the ice while returning to their island home. At the wake everyone agrees Alexander's father was "a good man on the ice."
Sometimes a survival tip empowers one with a sense of reassurance and control, but the tip in MacLeod's book has a horrifying and opposite effect. "They say that beneath the ice there is always a layer of air between it and the actual water. And that if you are swept under, the thing to do is to try to turn on your back until you can almost press your mouth and nostrils against the underside of the ice which will, at least, allow you to breathe. And then you must keep your eyes open so that you can see the hole that you came through and try to work yourself back towards it."
Suddenly the twinkling crystals become water demons beckoning innocents to the promise of beauty, only to grab their feet and pull them under. There, the gullible join other cryogenic fools waiting for the thaw of reason.
My husband, a good man on the ice, already has our skates warmed up by the fire. I won’t let him go alone. “Just don’t skate near me,” I say to him. The Royal Family flies in separate planes – in case of disaster, they don’t all want to go down together. “And here’s a hockey stick. We’ll each hold one to save the other.” Or face a romantic demise as one pulls the other to a watery grave.
The lake sounds like a mournful whale as the ice expands and contracts. I shut my eyes to absorb the strange melody – New Age music to calm the tentative soul? How can a live, evolving, moaning surface be safe? Yet somehow these funny random notes call me to play. Unlike Odysseus, I wear no physical restraints.
My initial steps are tentative; I’m a virtual Bambi on ice. I hug the shoreline as I pick up speed gradually, checking over my shoulder to be sure the father of my children, the love of my life, is still skimming across the surface. We have skated and played epic family hockey games for years on this same lake. This contained piece of ice, surrounded by four walls of plowed snow, maintains some sense of security for being “the known.”
The first open-ice skate is somewhat akin to a child dipping her toes anxiously into the unknown expanse of a lake when just yesterday she jumped fearlessly into the familiar confines of a swimming pool.
I watch my husband flying across the open expanse. There is a beauty in his uninhibited, fearless skating. The grace of motion resulting from years of hockey practice now has little connection to testosterone-charged changing rooms and crushing checks against the boards.
He trusts his age-old ice test after years of performing it. He is free to let go. I gain courage from his demonstration of science-based confidence. Although, he is the one with the biology degree. He has faith in the answer lying in the repetition of the same results.
I, however, am a student of psychology. The lake is as unpredictable, with its changing underwater streams, as people’s behaviour at a cocktail party.
Each glide is another check in the “safe” column of my mental ledger. At some point the checks become a steady beat drumming out with the steadfastness of a regular heartbeat.
Without at once being aware, I become one with the ice, no fissure of fear separating me from this moment. I fly across the ice, still close to shore, swinging my arms freely with each stride. The cold winter air, greedily captured with every breath, feeds my hungry muscles. I raise my arms in the air, the hockey stick held high, and celebrate the union of the elements, motion and calculated risk.
Shirley Stanton lives in Val des Monts, Que.