Happenings thirty years ago recede now, not only into another time but into another era, an era that’s “back there,” on the other side of the frontal edge of a warming earth.
In 1978, Beaver Lake froze over, not a light freeze, but a freeze so long and robust that people in Volkswagons drove out onto the surface and spun around in 360’s. Neighbors, especially people from northern states, rummaged their dark cedar closets for ice skates and, overnight, whole hockey courts appeared, defined by branches, shoes and soda cans. At night, you could hear conversations on the ice that would ricochet around, between old houses and ancient border trees.
One night the police showed up in dark uniforms and shouted out to a group of boys, “Get off the ice. Stop foolin’ around. Get off the ice.” The boys yelled back, “Come out here and get us,” and they yelled and screamed with laughter, full of night air and the clearness of stars over a frozen lake well south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Beaver Lake will probably never freeze solid again in my lifetime, in the lifetime of my girls or in the lifetimes of their children. The very notion of it is a phenomenon to be captured, in these days of evaporating ice caps, only by memory.
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