BLACK ICE

To walk over the High Bridge in deep winter is to walk uphill, head down so footing is sure. Breath is taken in by mouth covered by cloth. Eyes water and lashes are frosted by north winds cutting across the broad open expanse that joins the bluffs alongside the Mississippi River at Saint Paul. 

The pre-historic gorge is bare, its deep-time scars exposed. Trees are stripped of leaves and dirt at the roots is gone. Gnarled limbs on dark trunks signal the weather of this place. The flat light dulls all into equivalence with details hard to come by.

The wind, the knife, the howl. Bare skin feels crystalline. Moisture withers off surfaces and blood withdraws from limbs diving deeper towards warmth. Hands curl with fingers palmed in a fight against frostbite. It is dangerous to be out, to be so exposed. It is exhilarating. It is frightening. It is necessary.

Positioned two hundred feet above the river’s black ice, white ice and open water. Even in deepest winter channels remain open from the power-plant’s discharge into the river. The ancient confluence upstream joins in pushing silt, snags and floes into the pool. There has been a thaw, but the air has shifted back below freezing. All will close tight but for a fluid plume between the east bank and the edge of ice.

Stopped in the middle of the bridge, looking out downriver, the whiteness stretches beyond, then curves out of sight. I look down at the long drop below, a favored spot for the despondent. Plastic flowers bloom on the rail in memory of a recent jumper pulled out in rescue barely here, then gone soon after. Spring will release the missed winter bodies locked in until thaw.

But it is beautiful in its immensity, a ghost of its glacial mother. Melt-water pulsations and formations born of Agassiz scouring and filling the quaternary channel of the great River Warren, its massive waterfall shredding rock birthing this gorge as it traveled upstream, carving this place in its wake. It now sleeps under concrete, held for power by power in another city.

This ice is its short-lived offspring. An echo, an omen of what we now fear most — glaciers calving, sliding, scraping, flaying the topmost crust of earth, melting waters rising to overtake the land. New bodies and banks emerge and re-place boundaries. When we’re not in the way, it is majestic. When we are, it is catastrophic. We are in the way.

To walk over the High Bridge in deep winter brings on such spirits, such visions. The ever-changing ice is a force. Nature responds without question. We are a part of it subject to its demands. Winter’s early darkness, deep snow and cold, cutting winds, thickened blood, frozen skin and sharpened breath. It is how we must live in this time.

So be it. I love this portal, this earth, this stone, this river, this ice. Index of a moment that vanishes then resurfaces, dancing a new pattern moving and mixing with the wind, shape-shifting then still. On this threshold of reflection, I take what this moment has gifted me knowing it will all melt away, perhaps never to return. –PMR  2017