The Ice Cometh - A February Reflection
In the winter, living on the edge of an inland freshwater sea presents a person with the opportunity to witness the creative and destructive forces of nature that create Lake ice. For the past several weeks the temperature has not risen above 25 degrees F, mostly hovering around 15. The ice is forming. You might be thinking, “Hey, winter’s half over, isn’t this kind of late for ice?” The answer is no. You see Lake Michigan serves as a huge heat sink - its 45-degree water keeps Leelanau Peninsula, where Tusen Takk is located, warmer than the rest of northern Michigan. But when cold weather persists for an extended period of time like this, the top layer of lake water grows colder - and that’s when the ice begins to form.
At first, you notice the water looks and acts like it’s heavier; imagine undulating waves of dark blue, thick gravy dotted with globes of ice floating back and forth. The picture, to the right, shows this scene - the beginnings of the ice pack’s formation. I hope you agree that it’s a mysterious and beautiful sight to behold.
All year long the surf varies every day, sometimes every hour. When it comes to ice formation, this matters. If it’s calm, the ice solidifies, extending the ice shelf further out into the Lake. When waves are active, water is sprayed up onto the ice shelf, extending its frozen mass minutely upwards and outwards with each successive drenching. When violent waves crash against the ice shelf, like last night (see picture below), the ice breaks apart and floats out to sea, only to be washed back to shore to freeze again in the next day or two. And then there are days when the waves slow down and almost stop - this happens most in February and March. It’s during these times that the ice shelf can grow thirty to fifty feet out into the Lake in a single night.
Once every 75 years or so, Lake Michigan freezes completely over. When this happens the surface is solid 80 miles west to Green Bay, Wisconsin, 150 miles north to Lake Huron, and 340 miles south to Chicago. This happened five or six years ago and the thing I remember most from that event was that it got quiet here. Silent. All year long we hear the sound of the waves crashing against the shore - so much so that their sound must go to the back of my brain, unacknowledged. When the ice shelf forms, the sound of breaking waves on the ice pack takes place further out in the Lake, a more distant utterance but still there. When a freeze-over occurs, it stops.
The lesson I’ve learned from watching Lake Michigan’s ice form in winter is that it is a slow process. The work of sculpting the shore is done incrementally, day by day, night by night, using both additive and subtractive processes. Like much of the best art, music, and writing, this frozen landscape is as beautiful as it is strange. It’s never the same, it’s always changing in surprising ways. If you’re willing to take the time to notice such things, to be curious and go down to the Lake in February and March, you will find yourself surrounded by an immensity that cannot be adequately described - it can only be felt. I believe such experiences are necessary - they give us perspective, the opportunity to reflect on how we fit into a larger landscape. This is why I’m grateful for this time, right now, in the snow and cold, during COVID-19, when I’ve been able to slow down and see the ice form.
It’s typically in March when much of the dark blue water landscape transforms into a solid white ice pack. Mountains of ice often appear overnight as the ice shelf gets lifted up and displaced by strong waves and undercurrents, stacking thousand-pound blocks of ice on top of each other like pieces of a huge dismantled puzzle. We will see this happen soon.
