The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake

Wild Ice

Wild Ice 18 C hristmas Eve. The phrase evokes images of glowing candlelight and glinting tree ornaments. In our household, the morning of Christmas Eve is marked by a storm of activity. Kids bustle about, bellowing for scissors and Scotch tape, and wondering who used up the reindeer wrapping paper. The house is filled with the scent of fresh balsam—the tree came into the house only days earlier. In the kitchen, I preside over the beginnings of our Christmas Eve dinner. The fruity scent of ruby-red lingonberries melds with the yeasty fragrance of stollen, baking in the oven. I aim for the right mix of tradition and innovation in our holidays, so we can view the grand feast of the Incarnation , God in human form, with continuously new eyes. It’s a lot for one fragile human being to handle. Sometimes I need to decompress. After lunch, desperate for fresh air and a brief intermission, I take up my ice skates and make my way down the path to the lake. Skating is always coupled with Christmas in my mind. The very skates I hold in my mittened hand as I head out to the ice were a Christmas gift from my parents almost forty years ago. The skates are battered. The aging leather is yellowed and cracked, and the tops, looking like shoes you’d need a buttonhook for, resemble something out of Little Women. But they are serviceable, and my body knows them intimately, much like it knows my bicycle and my canoe paddle. My old-fashioned skates are a part of me. I learned how to skate only a few years after I learned how to walk. My mother, who spent her girlhood skating on the frozen Mississippi at Little Falls, taught me. We started right out on single blades, wasting no time with the double set of runners many beginners use. I leaned on her for support , where other neophytes might use a chair, shuffling forward as she glided backward, arms outstretched to hold me. There were spills, of course. On one memorable winter afternoon, as I skated backward in tandem with Mother, I caught a blade in a small crack in the ice and fell away, smacking my head hard. Shortly after, the school nurse informed my parents that I was badly nearsighted and needed glasses immediately. Medicine has yet to record a case where a blow to the cranium induced myopia. Still, my mother labored guiltily for years under a nagging suspicion that our passion for the ice had ruined my eyes. As a suburban child, I skated on outdoor rinks. Every elementary school in Roseville had two rinks and a warming house that were maintained, complete with an attendant , until late February. I may have learned to skate from my mother, but I honed my skill at the Lake Owasso rink, on the west shore of the lake itself, through countless rounds of Pom-Pom-Pull-Away. When I was an early teen, skating at the local rink after supper was the hot thing to do. It was a place to meet your friends, watch the boys, and exercise a bit of independence. For weeks after Christmas, a girlfriend and I walked the half-mile to the rink in the dark after supper. We adorned our skates with jingle bells and homemade pom-poms. Our wool skating socks, sometimes embroidered with yarn, were marks of fashion. With the same skates I now use, I’d Wild Ice 19 skate for two hours, until the lights shut off and the warming house closed. In those years, sexual tension was added to the complex pleasure of flying over glossy ice with ease and grace, in the exhilarating cold of winter. I was profoundly sad when, at the end of February, the ice softened and turned to slush. I bring a mix of psychological baggage to the ice this afternoon of Christmas Eve. Overstimulated by last-minute preparations , I seek the physical release that the ice will give me. I anticipate the pleasing repetition of steady strokes of the blades. However, I am not prepared for sheer visceral thrill. This is my first time skating this winter. Pioneer froze very late, only five days earlier. It finally iced over on a windless , subzero night. Very cold and very still: the recipe for excellent ice. From the shore the next morning, we saw...