The river above Key Bridge is completely iced over, has been for over a week now. I'd been watching the river and the ice over the last few weeks - there'd been a long cold-snap in dc, and the weather had stayed below freezing for long enough to convincingly freeze the river. DC's weather is inconsistent enough that usually some strange warm storm comes in within a few days, and melts everything with a few lush days of sun. But this time, the cold stayed. I'd watched fragile rims of ice form along the shore, then thicken and stretch out into the river, broken back by the tide's ripple, to reach out again the next day. On land, ice rafted thinly over puddles, and then froze them through.
Most of the time I write straight. I tell what happened. It doesn't always end like a story should, but stories don't always. A few years later, after occasionally editing and reposting this story, I can look back on this as a straight story, describing a phase when I was fascinated by risk and death. It does lend a certain spice to life. Ice is inconstant. It breaks and cold water kills. It's reassuring to walk through risk like Orpheus through hell but attributing survival to skill and worthiness is a self-deception.
I'd already been out walking on the ice, on the sheath over a small swamp. The ice was almost completely hard by then - I stamped a break through a weak point, and the shards were almost 2 inches thick. The ice was whitely opaque, upper crust frosted with small air bubbles, formed a broad curving path, the sway of the stream running through the swamp, with the dried bending and broken stalks of swampgrasses, and bulrushes, waving brown along the margins.
I ended up breaking through twice, and sinking ankle-deep into wet mud, then quick-stepping back across breaking ice to a solid place. My shoe-laces and one pantsleg were frozen rigid by the time I left. It had clearly not yet been cold enough, for long enough, to consider walking on the river. Because walking on river ice is pretty foolish, much more so than walking a lake, or a place of still water. The flows and shifts of the river create inconsistencies, weak spots, and to fall in would involve being swept downstream, trapped beneath the ice.
One of my purest moments of ice I've experienced was up in Canada, north of Montreal. McGill University had a cabin in the woods, and I'd go up there when I had a few free days during exams, because it was almost always beautifully empty then. I would bring a bag of books and notebooks with me, heavy in my backpack as I walked the road from where the bus stopped into the woods, would sometimes even flip through them in the evening, while sitting by the fireplace at night.
I spent the days hiking, through autumn's leaves or snow, or on cross-country skis, fumbling through fresh snow. I carried matches, snacks, a flashlight and a few garbage bags in case I had to overnight in the woods. I hiked through winter days of bright sun where the cold froze tears to my face, days of storm where the wind blew harsh screes of fine ice, days of cold breathed through layers of my scarf, ever moving to keep the cold from settling in.
One time I went up after the winter's first long cold, before any snow had fallen. So pure a freeze was rare. The nearby lakes were sheathed in glass, wide seamless floors that I walked out over, ice so taut and fresh that my weight sent long slow ripples across it, broad waves that would take over a minute to travel across the water, resonate against the land, and return to me, inspiring a slow rise and fall, a plastic thrill to the surface and a waver of my horizon - green walls of pines rimming the lake, with a blue bowl of a sky.
My footsteps would sometimes launch lightning streaks ahead of me, cracks in the ice shooting straight away, and then curving slightly, as the force dissipated, a fast snap of sound travelling away, and then echoing back, from the shore's trees, as the ice tore apart along a hairline.
The ice was much too thin to be safe. I could have broken through the inch or less of ice with a quick stomp, or a fall. I walked a smooth step-glide, never stopping because that put the ice-wave out of sync, started a disconcerting bob in the thin meniscus of ice. Above the shallows along the shore, I could see straight to the bottom, as if I was walking on water. Which I was. I watched the water-weeds sway gently, slow fish drifting in the cold. Further out, the water was dark below me, fading into black.
It was profoundly stupid to be out there, a quarter-mile from any shore, too far to flounder back to land through breaking ice, and miles from rescue, from other people, in a time before cell phones. If I broke through, I'd struggle to thrash up out of the death-chilling water, only to break through the ice once again, and sink back among the shards.
It was a thrilling experience. I got back to the cabin after dark, cold hungry and tired, eyes and mind seared by the sun's bright bounce off the ice, by the cold, by the ache of concentration that comes from immersing into a long, elemental risk.
Which is why I was watching the Potomac River ice over with such interest. I wanted to walk up its center to Chain Bridge, to go by foot where I had only ever been with my kayak. I wanted to walk the river as my grand wide personal highway. I'd already seen human footprints crossing the river, but had decided to wait a few more days.
Then before the cold could really densen the ice, it warmed above zero, rained for a day, and the river's hard plane of ice cracked and broke, angular floes swept downstream and piled up into walls along the shoreline. The Three Sisters (a series of rocks upstream from Key Bridge) became ramparts of ice, 5-15 feet high, piled-up blocks pushed into the rocks by the flow of the river, as if the islands were icebreakers, plowing through an Arctic sea.
The area upstream of Key Bridge was still mostly ice-covered, but by a slushy conglomerate, wide overlain triangles of ice 8-10 inches thick and a few feet across, floating within treacherous boundaries of smaller pieces being ground into slush. So instead I took the Potomac Heritage Trail, following the base of Arlington's high cliffs below George Washington Parkway, a trail half-drowned during floods, like today's.
The previous day's sudden warmth and steady rain had sent a wave of snowmelt down the watershed, over 11,000 square miles of land, channelled into a slow crest, peaking 3 feet above normal flow. The trail starts below Key Bridge, on the Virginia side, at the point where the last tidal ripples fade and cede to the river's downstream.
DC's history pivots around the port of Georgetown, the furthest upstream point of the Potomac still navigable by boats from the sea. That boundary is determined by the Fall Line, a rock ridge that intersects the Potomac at Great Falls, about 15 miles upstream. Between here and Great Falls are broad canyons of cliffs, overgrown rock faces and sharp boulders, pushed slowly into the river by the work of roots and frost, tumbled and scoured downstream. From here, the cliffs fade into wide flood-plains, low-rolling hills, ideal for trails and roads and houses and farms and cities.
Only the Potomac River Valley itself keeps an illusion of how things were, pre-industrialization - ignore the traffic's everpresence, the flash of cars along Canal Road, the planes overhead like high, drifting birds, the houses nestled along the top of Maryland's ridge, and you're back in time, wandering a trail between soft sandy bottom-lands, and ridges of sharp rocks, the push of a stream towards the river, under the shade of a winter afternoon, tall stalwart trees ceding to saplings and brush, slopes transitioning to cliffs and back, and trail subsumed by flood...
1/2 a mile upstream from Key Bridge, I stop and watch the open river meet the margin of ice. The water's flow brings curving ribbons, galaxies, of ice chunks, seethes them into the ice boundary, a conglomeration of loose particles, pressed against each other by the force of the river. The ice sheet is a loosely-packed cobblestone road, almost-fixed, but the impact of a dense wave of ice causes ripples, knocks the array into a slightly different alignment.
Most of the ice brought down-river disappears at the edge, pushed under the floes, to be dragged along the underside, or to catch and wedge, and slowly mesh, or nudge upwards through its cousins to the surface. It's an interesting expression of the river, watching the force of the water-flow translated into a layer of ice. The boundary breathes, compresses with the impact of a flotilla of ice, and loosens in the absence. There is a continual soft roar, the hiss of the water's energy diffusing against the blocks, the soft cumulative grate of ice on ice, and the slow stir of waves and lulls through the mass.
Further upstream, the river is wild - high, swirling and brown, deadly cold. Not angry although it seems so. The river just is, is the accumulation of the land and weather and water above it, an inherited history, summed up in each moment, at each point, specific constellations of waves and flow and light.
I've hiked this path during floods - there's a challenging stretch at the end, about 3/4 mile long, where the trail is flooded, pushing me upslope, balancing along the steep high bank of the river. A smooth, iced-over sheet of snow covers the cliffs - on the shaded Virginia side, the snow takes longer to melt. In some ways, this makes walking easier - by scuffing into the snow I create decent footholds, can balance better across the slopes.
The most awkward part of the hike is a series of rampart cliffs. The Potomac's rocks have clear sharp angles, are well-cut - there are few faces without handholds, cracks and ledges. Most cliffs along the river have an easy route, a wide crack that can be worked or wedged, but today, the ice makes things awkward - I brace against handholds, gauge the slip of the ice, and reach for the next grip. A few times I have to extract, work my way back up-slope, to try another passage. No one else has come this way - the other human tracks faltered before the cliffs.
The rocks aren't particularly challenging, and even the ice just adds another layer of caution, but to fall into the river at this point would be unpleasant - I usually work with a margin of error, keep track of handholds to catch on my way down, but on a day like today I don't want to make mistakes.
At the same time, the focus required is thrilling, absorbing - it demands an intimacy, a present awareness of texture and balance and position. I've taken my gloves off for better grip, and the cold from the rocks and ice is nestling inwards. I could go back, but I don't want to. I want to reach Chain Bridge, and cross, wander through the flooded bottomlands on the MD side, and then sprint-walk back along the C&O canal, to warmth and food.
Once I hit an ice patch, and slip immediately, throw myself into the slope, and catch with both hands - lucky, because I'm 100 feet above the river, with a long slide and no trees to catch between - stopping my fall would have been a challenge. It's also a good warning about alertness - I'd been following a path of animal tracks in the snow, and had noted with curiosity that the tracks faded from one step to the next - instead of pausing and examining, I'd continued on, nearly blundering into an accident.
I end up back up against the river, which coils wild around stout trunks, brown waves streaming farther out. By now, I'm carrying hunger inside me, feel the ebb of my energy starting, am timing the route home, walking fast against the cold, and humming as I think about what's in my fridge. I get hungry fast, lack metabolic momentum. My body is a flame that can be quickly snuffed. But I do like being on the edge of hunger, and working for my next meal.
I cross a waterfalling stream cleft into the rocks, dropping five or ten feet at a time, and then pooling, streaming from one clear deep pool nestled into boulders into the next waterfall. Cocky, and moving too quickly, I mistake a thin sheen of ice across a rock for waterspray, step and immediately slip, go knee-deep with both feet as I stumble for balance, then climb out and empty the water from my shoes, wring out my wet socks, grinning ruefully as I put them back on. There's still 5 miles ahead of me, but it's not all that cold, and I know that as long as I keep moving, I'll stay warm.
For the last mile, I venture out onto the river's margin of ice - there's a relatively flat path of ice, running parallel to the shore - I slide and leap, balancing, from one sheet to the next. The ice is 10-12 inches thick, snow-frosted on top, and an ethereal, arctic blue beneath, blue like fresh glaciers. I've never seen the Potomac this pure, have always known it either transparent, or brown with dirt, silt and growth.
I fall in once, while trying to balance across a stretch of smaller pieces - they tilt downwards and then slide out from beneath my feet, dropping me knee-deep into the water, leaning forwards to catch myself on a stable shelf of ice. The ice closes back around my legs, hard edges of triangles a foot across, the water's cold not yet registering as I imagine being caught fully within this heavy slurry, clambering to keep my head above the water, trying to balance my upper body onto a larger piece as the wet-slick ice tried to close around me. I scrabble out, and walk on wet.
I flush out deer, hear them breaking through the underbrush, and try to track them by sight, moving within the brown screen of winter-bare trunks. Their bodies are the same color as the trees, and so I watch for the white flash of their tails, bounding...three, five, seven - they're hard to count. This river bottom-land is always a zen place for me - in summer, it's scattered with dark, shallow pools shaded by young trees, green-rich with water-plants and rimmed by moss-thick boulders...
The terrain is flat, from when this was the riverbed, dense with trees and high with grass - chest-high in full summer, then fading, drying, stalks curving over through fall, and now, as winter starts to end, the grass is knee-high - flattened by now-melted snow into soft waves. I follow the trails of deer through it, drifting unfocussed, the trails fading and flowing into each other as I move over the leaning trunks of fallen trees, around pools, and through underbrush, letting the land shape my path.
I sought out risk because I thought it could offer redemption, could affirm the rightness of my place, my awareness, my belonging. When one believes in an external reality that observes and evaluates, taking risks is offering oneself up for judgement. Survival is affirmation.
I take fewer risks now but still do. I now rarely hit that thrumming panic of being caught suddenly within a danger that is beyond my strength, but I still go into nature and push my limits. It is like laying my neck on a worthy altar. Judging by my father's actions, I won't ever stop.