Walden Pond keeps its ice longer than you’d expect. This is April. The maples along the shore have blurred into that tentative reddish haze that precedes leaf, and the wood frogs have been calling since the first warm rain, that sound like a convention of small dissatisfied men. Still the ice holds.
It holds the way a person holds a belief when everyone around them has moved on. Not stubbornly. Just by the logic of its own interior cold, the dark three-meter depth that the sun has not yet reached. What the surface does does not change this.
The ice-out happens and nobody witnesses it. This is the first thing to understand. It doesn’t happen with a crack, a dramatic splintering. It happens overnight or in the gray hour before six when the mist is still sitting on the water and there is no one. You drive by one morning and the pond is open. Gray-blue and open and riffling where the wind crosses it. Yesterday you had to look twice to see the black patches spreading from the center. Today the whole thing is itself again.
Thoreau measured ice-out at Walden the way he measured everything, with a ruler and a journal and a kind of hope that the numbers would eventually mean something larger than themselves. He had thirty years of records for local ponds. He noted when the swallows came back, when the first flowers opened, when the ice went. He was looking for a hidden order. He thought he was reading a language.
The ice-out at Walden now runs eight to ten days earlier than it did in his time. This is just true. It is one of ten thousand ways the world has registered the heat we’ve put into it, quieter than most—no flood, no fire, just a pond opening a little earlier in spring, the frogs calling into air that was not ready for them, the migrating birds arriving to find nothing where they expected food.
It is raining this morning on the eastern shore. The rain on open water makes a particular sound—not like rain on pavement or on leaves but a soft obliteration, a rain absorbed into itself. If you stand at the water’s edge the pond is the same color as the sky and the line between them is only a matter of texture.
A man is walking his dog along the path. The dog is interested in something at the edge of the water, a piece of ice that didn’t make it back out. Chunk of it, cloudy and crystallized, eight inches thick and two feet wide, beached on the stones. The dog sniffs it with the full seriousness dogs bring to investigation. The man waits. This is what they do, these two: the man waits and the dog follows its attention wherever it goes, and in the space of that permission some understanding moves between them that has no words and doesn’t need any.
The ice will be gone by noon. The water will carry it, the rain will carry it, the warmth the air holds now—just barely, just above forty degrees—will do the slow molecular work. By noon: a pond again, all of it, with nothing solid in it but the ledge at the bottom that has been there since the glacier set it down.
The glacier. There was ice here once that would have stood ten stories above the treetops. It moved south at a foot per year and then it stopped and then it melted and left behind a hole which filled with water which stayed full and which a man eventually moved beside to think about what it meant to live deliberately, by which he meant: to choose each moment, to let each morning be a new beginning, to refuse the slow accretion of days that adds up to a life unlived.
What he didn’t reckon on was that the moments keep coming whether you choose them or not. That the pond is not waiting for you to decide to notice it. That the ice goes out on its own schedule and doesn’t know it’s being watched or measured or mourned or loved.
The dog has had enough. It turns and bounds back up the path, ears loose, fully committed to whatever is next. The man follows, hands in his pockets, the rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket. They disappear around the bend.
The rain on the water.
The piece of ice in the stones, smaller now by some amount that cannot be measured by looking.