Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] Fw: Skaters, frost and counterpoint
From:
Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Date:
Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:42:13 -0500
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>

Can I share something briefly?  It includes a suggestion for a “right” word for ice, specifically, as in the examples cited, deep hard river ice. In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, before the very biggest ore ships began arriving to feed the automotive machine at River Rouge. The Detroit River, fast flowing south from Lake St Clair, down to Detroit, and thence to Lake Erie, presented a fascinating challenge to Detroit boys. The river froze deep and hard — let me call it black steel, it was truly that hard, and, at night, that color.

But in the very center, the freighter channel almost almost never completely froze because of the current, leaving a fearsomely fast stream of subzero water not wide enough for trade but wide enough to suggest an exciting game for depression era boys.

All along the river, from Peche Island off Windmill Point in Detroit, south to Belle Isle athwart East Detroit, and then all the way down to the Ambassador Bridge, connecting Canada and the US, rugged little hockey playing punks, from ten to sixteen years old, would compete with each other in skating as fast as they could toward the widest breaks in the river ice they could find, daring each other to try wider and wider gaps, and then leaping with all their strength, flying over the rushing gap to land on their skates on the other side on pure unscarred ice the color of onyx.  And then, gathering strength and speed in a wide, arm-swinging loop, they would leap back. If they made it, applause and a hand-rolled cigarette or a gulp of schnapps. If not, the cold shut their consciousness down quickly (I have since learned), and below the surface the brutishly powerful current would drag the boys away from the relatively small opening they had leapt. They would be quickly be frozen hard, and usually not found until spring. Sometimes as far downriver as Lake Erie. Each and every winter, for a couple of decades, a scandalous number of the toughest and most daring kids in the city met death this way. The newspapers railed but no one -- cops, teachers, parents — did much to stop them.

Finito. A true story. Both my father and my wife’s father did this as kids and she and I both had this story told to us as kids. To my wife as a cautionary tale; from my father, I suspect, as a suggestion for when I complained about having nothing to do. Compare this with Woolf’s surrealistic boating disaster in which a dinghy full of apple sellers and tortoises managed to pull a Titanic in the middle of some Brit puddle. But I enjoy Woolf’s work and am not knocking her, and the tears begin to well up when I imagine the boat going down and the tortoises and apple sellers fighting over life jackets and the crew playing “Nearer My God To Thee.”

Just kiddin.  You know I love you guys.

Andrew “Buttinski” Brown

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