You Could See it Coming

Ever have one of those experiences where you could see that something was about to happen and there was nothing you could do about it? Like one time when I lived in Vermont. Just off the freeway where the K-Mart used to be in South Burlington, I saw an old blue Pontiac come tearing out of that parking lot headed for Shelburne Road. Guy didn’t look like he was even going to slow down at the traffic light, and I thought: He’s going to just miss my car and smack into that Taurus right behind me.

And that was exactly what happened. I could only watch in the rear-view mirror as the Pontiac flat-out ran the red light and t-boned the red Taurus. There was a loud bang I could feel in the back of my skull, then a cloud of dust; broken glass, taillight shards and bits of chrome trim landed at random on the street. Both cars came to rest crumpled and smoking like drunks on the sidewalk outside Charlie-O’s in Montpelier. After pulling over I looked back and saw both drivers emerge from their vehicles, wobbly but appearing miraculously unscathed. Cell phones didn’t exist in those days, or at least I’d never seen one, so with trembling hands I gulped down the rest of the coffee I had been sipping and drove slowly away.

But I was going to tell you a different story. All the hot weather here lately has me trying to visualize cooler times and places, fishing for mental images to help distract from the heat. Just this morning I remembered a January day in 2003 when I was wading through gradual school in Wisconsin. I was separated from my then-wife and in the process of getting divorced. There had never been a divorce in my family; I felt the breath of judgment on the back of my neck, but that’s life.

I was living in the basement of an elderly woman’s home on Madison’s near east side. It was an old, two-story brick place with lovely wood floors. A front room had big east-facing windows and a baby grand piano. I had kitchen privileges upstairs and would noodle on the baby grand when my landlady was out; otherwise I mostly stayed in my basement cave, nibbling on Scotch.

Across the street from the house was a quiet city park along the shore of beautiful Lake Monona. Kayaks and sailboats passed in review during summer; those gave way to pick-up hockey games when the lake froze over a few months later. The Yahara River—folks there called it a river, though really it was more of a lazy ditch with locks allowing boats to transit between Lake Monona and the larger Lake Mendota to the west—passed at the end of the block the house was on, flowing just enough to keep a small patch of water open through the winter. Ducks paddled and quacked their way through the frigid months in that small refuge, awaiting warmer days.

A cold snap gripped the region that January, with nights down well below zero and daytime temperatures in the low single digits under startling blue skies. The bright sunshine would fool you: the days looked lovely—they were lovely—but when you stepped outside you felt the cold air bite your face. After a couple of below-zero nights the lake had a good, thick sheet of ice on her. In the afternoon sail-powered iceboats would come out and race side by side around a course set up near the opposite shore, scary fast up on two skate blades with the third skate poised in the air like a cutlass.

My days were spent huddled in front of a computer screen under neon lights in an office at the university, irradiating my brain with white noise piped through headphones to drown out the babbling of an office-mate who never stopped talking from the time she walked into our shared space in the morning until she left to go home in the afternoon. At lunch I walked to a deli across the street or to the Med School cafeteria a city block away through a maze of corridors and hallways connecting the old buildings, slow-walking back with a bagel or a cheese sandwich and another cup of coffee to help me make it through the afternoon.

Madison had a decent public transit system and I rode the 7 bus to and from campus in the winter months, commuting by mountain bike in summer or occasionally driving my old Focus wagon if I needed to get groceries or run other errands. The bus picked me up two blocks away from the house and threaded the isthmus between Lake Monona and Lake Mendota, looping around Capitol Square downtown and over to the university campus where it stopped just a block from my office. There wasn’t much thinking involved in that commute, and I passed the time watching the city scroll past through the bus window.

On a bright, cold Thursday afternoon that January I rode the bus home after a day at the office. It was too cold to stand in one place for long but too sunny to go into my basement right away, so I walked down to the park for a look at the frozen lake. Monona was beautiful in her winter ice, a few ducks paddling quietly in the small patch of open water where the Yahara flowed in gently from the west. A lone ice skater dribbled a hockey puck up and down the near shore; across by the other side of the lake iceboats hurtled around a course laid out with pylon cones. A guy in sweats jogged slow laps through the park.

To the south, toward downtown, I saw the small figure of a man on a bicycle dressed in black and churning his way up the frozen lake in my direction. I was struck by the sight of the hardy, intrepid soul apparently unfazed by the biting cold and undaunted by the expanse of ice around him or the dark, cold water below. People in Wisconsin don’t let winter bother them, I thought with a mix of admiration and envy. They skate, they fish through the ice, they race iceboats. And of course, they drink like fish. No wonder the cold doesn’t bother them.

The man on the bike grew larger and more distinct as he continued up the lake, still a quarter-mile or more away. His progress was steady as he made his way over the ice. The ducks treading water nearby didn’t seem to notice his approach or to care, perhaps thinking in their own way only of distant springtime when the lake would open back up and ducks would not be confined to a small patch of water.

The ducks’ winter refuge with its fleeting wisps of steamy vapor was surrounded on three sides by a nebulous, shifting margin that was the winter boundary between water in its liquid form and the solid, frozen sheet that covered most of the lake at that time of year. I could see this transition zone where liquid and solid elbowed each other through the winter but could not limn its borders with any precision. No need, really—even kids growing up in the desert had heard about the perils of thin ice: keep back, stay away, don’t push your luck–you don’t want to end up in that cold, dark water. Nothing good will happen if you go in there. Everybody knew that much.

As the man on the mountain bike got closer I could faintly hear his tires crunching over the frozen lake surface and could see the plumes of his exhaled breath swirl momentarily in his wake before dispersing. He wore black gloves and a black balaclava, and carried a small backpack. Like an early Antarctic explorer in a grainy black-and-white photo, his balaclava was encrusted with a frosty rime of ice. He was breathing vigorously but showed no sign of tiring.

The skater with the hockey stick stopped by the lake shore to watch as the man on the bike approached, only a hundred fifty yards away now. I saw that the line the bike was following would bring the man in black just to the far end of the patch of open water shining in the bright afternoon sun. He’ll go out a bit further, I thought, to give himself room there. Just to be on the safe side. The rider steered neither right nor left, though, but continued on his path. My throat tightened slowly as I watched.

Then suddenly, I could see it coming: if the man on the bike didn’t change course, I realized, he would break through the ice directly in front of where I stood and would go into the dark, unthinkably cold water a hundred yards from shore, just where the ducks’ winter refuge lapped up against the broad expanse of frozen lake ice. I wanted to scream, to yell and wave my arms, to fire an invisible force-field beam at the man and shove him to safety just a few yards farther east, toward where the distant blue and red and yellow iceboats raced along the opposite shore. Ten feet would be enough. But the man on the bike held to his course. It was already too late; there was nothing I could do.

Time shifted into low gear and events began to unfold in excruciating slow motion. The front wheel of the mountain bike plunged through the ice exactly where I had known that it would and the man, still wearing boots, winter jacket and balaclava, and with the pack still strapped to his back, hurtled headfirst over the bike’s handlebars and disappeared through the sudden, ragged hole in the ice. I immediately wished with all my heart that I was back in my office trying not to listen to my colleague’s incessant prattling, or even folding t-shirts at the laundromat, anywhere but standing on the shore of Lake Monona watching a very stupid man about to drown for no good reason on this very cold and beautiful afternoon.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Lake Monona varies in depth from summer to winter and from year to year. It has a maximum depth at mid-lake of 74 feet and substantial shallow areas with depths of only a few feet. The point at which the Yahara River enters the lake, where a few hardy ducks paddle through fleeting wisps of steamy vapor dreaming of distant springtime, is one of the shallowest parts of the lake with depths of as little as 1 to 3 feet depending on the time of year. I have no idea whether the man on the mountain bike knew any of this. Personally, I wouldn’t have wanted to have a glass of water poured over me outdoors on that sunny, bitingly cold afternoon, but then I was still new to Wisconsin.

Time resumed its normal pace. I dropped my satchel at the edge of the park and the skater, the jogger and I all converged on the hole in the ice where the man in black had gone into the water. Ducks muttered and moved to the far side, wanting nothing to do with us but not yet ready to take wing. The man re-surfaced and gargled a brief “Help!” before disappearing again. Feeling trapped in a bad dream, I stripped off my winter jacket thinking that as much as I wished I were somewhere else I had an obligation to try to help the intrepid biker turned fool about to die. So I would lie flat on my belly to spread my weight on the ice and throw one sleeve of the jacket to him while holding onto the other jacket sleeve. It seemed like a terrible plan but nothing better came to mind and I thought, resignedly, Maybe we’re both going to die today.

Focused only on the terrible scene in front of me and on what I had to do, I lost track of the jogger and the skater, who with his hockey stick would have been much better equipped to help a man out of the water. The biker popped up again, gesturing to the ragged edge of the hole and warning the three of us: Careful, it’s thin right there. No kidding, those were his exact words, before he disappeared again into the water. Then, to my astonishment, he resurfaced and began to kick and splash, pushing the bike up onto the ice, dribbling silty globs of lake-bottom muck and trailing long strands of mottled green aquatic weeds. The thin, weak ice crumbled away but he continued to kick and push, shoving the bike ahead of him and using it to spread his weight as he wriggled up out of the hole. His soggy balaclava had ridden up and he now peered out through the mouth-hole and was missing one glove, but his jacket and backpack were still in place.

Seeing the man’s progress, the other three of us stopped a few yards away. Wriggling awkwardly, the accidental diver wormed his way to what looked like safe ice. I put my jacket back on and zipped it up to my chin. We helped the man to his feet and walked him and the bike away from the ragged hole into which he had disappeared only seconds earlier. Water streamed off him and his boots squished loudly with each step, pumping muddy water onto the ice. A trail of drops and globs marked his path, quickly assuming solid form behind us. The jogger in his sweats and the skater, clambering awkwardly on hockey blades, helped the man in black up the embankment into the park. I followed pushing the mountain bike, which emitted soft grinding and creaking sounds with each turn of its wheels. Looking down, I saw ice crystals already forming along the backbone of the bike’s frame where faded decals proclaimed, “Trek”.

Squinting against brilliant late-afternoon sun streaming through the park’s bare trees, plumes of our exhaled breath dissipating in the cold air, the four of us looked at each other in wonder. Complete strangers, we had together witnessed and experienced, each from our own point of view, the apparent near-certain death and startling, near-instantaneous resurrection of one of our group, while just across the lake brightly-colored iceboats scrimmaged hull-to-hull and right across the street upper middle-class neighbors in comfortable brick homes poured glasses of wine and began to think about dinner—all within clear view of the ragged, watery hole already beginning to freeze over again, and all almost certainly unaware of what had just happened. It was a profoundly surreal moment and I suspect that each of us realized immediately on some level that it would be difficult or impossible to explain those 90 seconds to anyone who wasn’t there in person to hear the ducks muttering softly a few yards away and to witness an unexpected baptism in the beautiful lake’s shockingly cold, sediment-laden waters on that sunny and bitterly cold afternoon.

The man in black had pale, white skin with dark stubble on his jaw and red-rimmed brown eyes. He accepted his mountain bike back from me and offered us all a brief thanks. Hesitating but genuinely afraid that he would go into shock from the cold, I offered a hot shower and change of clothes. But he shook his head, saying “No thanks, I think I’ll just ride home.” And with that he climbed back on the bike and set off crunching over the park’s winter-crisp, brown grass, one hand gloved and the other bright-red with cold, wheels grumbling on ice-encrusted bearings as he slowly gathered momentum. I retrieved my satchel from the cold ground at the park’s edge and the remaining three of us slowly shook our heads, then each went our own way.

Back in my basement across the street I poured two fingers of Highland Park single-malt into a glass. My nostrils flared at the smoky undertone of far-away peat as the golden liquid burned its way down my throat. I sipped slowly, breathing in and out as my heart returned to its regular cadence and sensation seeped back into my fingers and toes.

I have of course had many opportunities since that day to consider situations in which I see clearly, or think I see, what is about to happen but cannot alter the course of events. I am sometimes convinced that an important or startling or unforeseen occurrence is about to take place, and often I’m right—but at other times I’m profoundly mistaken and, either way, events that do transpire frequently lead in turn to completely unforeseen subsequent outcomes.

My divorce became final that summer. I happily embarked on a new relationship that, years later, turned out to have been a huge mistake. But who knew? I took up kayaking with a club at the university, learning to “Eskimo roll” first in a heated pool, then in murky Lake Mendota and finally in pounding whitewater rapids. I also learned that there are few things in life as sweet as a breath of air after being upside down in cold water. I gave up drinking a few years ago and am happier for it, but can still conjure and appreciate the smoky-peat aroma of single-malt Scotch if I stop and close my eyes. I never saw any of those guys from the park again, and haven’t been back to Madison since finishing school more than 15 years ago. Still, I hope that the man in black stays off the lake ice, unless he learns to “Eskimo roll” his mountain bike.  

Stay safe, I’ll write again soon.