Wild Ice

We were fortunate to have a short-lived period of wild ice here in Minneapolis recently. Wild ice—for those readers in sunnier climes whose primary exposure to ice is as a tool for drink cooling—is a coveted, but rare winter phenomenon in the deep north. 

It occurs when temperatures plunge sufficiently low, while winds stay calm and snow has yet to fly. With these conditions, the ice that forms over lakes can be close to glass and it can freeze so clear that on sunny days you can see through to the still watery world below.

Wild ice is beautiful, and it also opens up an all too brief window of otherwise impossible recreational activities, including ice boating (sailboats on long sharp blades of steal) and uninterrupted whole-lake skating, ideally at night under the light of a full moon. 

And then snow falls and it is gone, possibly not to return for years, sometimes as long as a decade. Extended periods of wild ice are mythic and I still vividly recall one of those moon-lit skates forty years later.

You get a sense for its spectacle in the photo that accompanies this post (see below). It is of my daughter out on a lake on some ice that is frozen perfectly smooth, so that the crisp, sunny day sky is reflected brilliantly below her, like she is crawling on the heavens.

What you can’t see is the countless adults walking by who are made nervous by this scene. The ice is fairly newly formed, and the grownups are flashing back to all of the times their parents aggressively warned them of the dangers of thin ice over and over.

And they are wondering where the girl’s parents are. To the point that the situation almost spirals out of control. Eventually, I find myself yelling at one of them, one who insisted on getting involved. And, were the other person a fellow male, the confrontation may have turned physical.

I will provide additional details below so that you can decide which side of the skirmish you would have been on, had you been passing by, but there is a reason for sharing this story that goes beyond mildly hoping you will side with me, however unhinged I have may have been in the moment.

It has to do with the extent to which humans have a herd-like aspect to our nature, which predisposes us to resist going our own way and unnerves others when we do break free. If you are following my writing because you are beginning to question just how sufficiently K-12 is preparing your kids for life, you may end up taking some of your own steps away from the herd.

Should you begin to make that move, you will want to prepared for the unease your efforts may cause, as well as to be properly fortified in a manner that, should you encounter more outright pushback, you have the proper mindset in place—a mix of compassion for the concerned, mixed with a sense of leaning into your efforts all the more.

Enjoying wild ice, by definition, involves making calculations about the ice’s stability, because it is so fleeting. You can’t wait for ideal ice depth. And it is true that the ice my daughter was on was sufficiently new that middle of the lake was still open water or had just the thinnest layer on it.

It is also true that, while you can’t see it in picture, the shore is only five to 10 feet away, meaning that the depth of the water under the ice, the water my daughter would have plunged into had the ice given way, would have come up to her mid-shin at most.

My daughter, who is 11, wasn’t alone on the ice. Her best pal, who is 9, was also with her. The two girls are currently enjoying a fortunate phase of life where they both still have exceptional imaginations that also happen to be in perfect harmony with each other’s imaginations.

Were you to pass through our living room on a given day, you might think you see them just standing on chairs in our living room, or bouncing on a couch, but in the reality of their minds they are dragons soaring free in some far-away realm, which they can inhabit for hours and hours. It is glorious.

The perfect, mirror-like lake ice undoubtedly added a whole brilliant new plane for their play, and they were enraptured, experiencing transcendent fun at a level that for adults requires psilocybin and very likely the services of a pricey shaman.

Adults, meanwhile, walk around this lake mostly to get their steps in, possibly while connecting with friends and engaging in one of the two dominant topics for you overhear passersby engaging in—either venting frustration about work colleagues, mothers, or spouses.

(I recently overheard a woman confessing to her friend that she felt bad about not standing up for Ryan, her husband, when all her friends at book club were complaining about their husbands, because Ryan really is such a good spouse, but she didn’t think it would have gone over well.)

I could hear walkers expressing concern about the two girls and the danger of thin ice. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to them that the clearly once handsome guy with the white beard and fraying baseball cap was in fact the attentive, vigilant parent and guardian of the situation, and he had things under control.

The girls had been in their own world for 45 minutes. Initially, they had been in an area that did have thin ice, ice they could kick through the, so they had migrated to this sturdier area. Eventually, I decided to drift back to where we had first parked minivan so I could pull up to the new location for when they got cold.

The girls were in sight the whole time; I could see a middle-aged woman with a beautiful golden retriever approach them, presumably confirming that a parent was nearby and staying by them, I assumed, because my dog-obsessed daughter would be asking about the golden.

I rejoined them and commented to the visitor on the beautiful, sunny day. The woman, her jaw clenched, looked at me like I was crazy for commenting on the weather, and started in on the dangers of the ice, the underground spring in the area that could make it unstable, and on and on.

I nodded. Nodded some more. The information wasn’t just being shared. There was intensity that was more fitting for a time when I might be dangling the girls off the side of a skyscraper

I finally cut in and said something that turned out to be very triggering, offering: “They’re actually fine. It’s beautiful. They’re having a great time. And the water is about a foot deep, so if they go in, we’re okay.”

What caught me so off guard—and what relates to the broader message of the post—was that this was not the end of the encounter. My parenting was so disturbing that my suggestion that it was intentional would not be the end of the exchange.

The thin ice expert continued to want to debate the situation. Through low-level seething, she wanted to know how long i had lived near this lake (I would resist the urge to regale her with interesting stories about my family as early settlers in this very area), and again she started explaining how I didn’t understand about the underground spring and its impact on the ice

And then she was asking me to take a step back, because I was making her uncomfortable, but the lecture continued.

I clearly need to be meditating more, because I didn’t laugh this all off. Instead, I raised my voice, telling her that we didn’t want anything to do with her and that she should move along. And, yes, she continued her lecture about the dangers of the ice, though now beginning to walk away.

It was at this point that I looked back at the girls, saw my daughters' tears, and instinctively sensed that the exchange I had missed had been more upsetting than I imagined, which is when the unhinged yelling began, and it was only my daughter’s presence that kept me from under any control.

“You don’t know what you are talking about! Stay away from my child! You don’t know what you are talking about!” Walkers were all now definitely wondering what the hell was going on.

I regained my composure. I asked my daughter what the woman had said and, through tears, my daughter explained that the woman had called them liars when she said her dad was right over there, and pointed at me in the car. They were liars because she had been watching them and there was no parent. She had even checked the parking lot! And now she was going to call 911 if they didn’t get off the ice that very second.

Wild ice. Fleeting spectacle. Kids marveling and enthralled. Kids walking on the sky. Kids sliding along as flying dragons. Insert go-to line of Mary Oliver poetry: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary, may you rest in peace: I want my kids to seek and ride wild ice, and similarly respond to other natural spectacle when they are greeted by it.

Our kids are learning a lot at school. They have some outstanding teachers. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, many pandemic related, the veil has dropped on the notion that the K-12 system equates with sufficient preparation for making the most of this one precious life. Once the veil drops, you can’t put it back.

As we who see increasingly endeavor to supplement the status quo, seeking for our kids the wild ice (along with an ability to computer code and communicate skillfully with video), we will categorically, emphatically not be out to indict the efforts of other parents or our schools. And yet that may be what others experience, despite our best efforts to the contrary.

This is just the way humans are wired. Ask anyone who doesn’t drink whether they are aware that their sobriety has and odd way of making those who drink uneasy. The same for vegans causing cognitive dissonance for carnivores, including the ones who really aren’t trying to convert anyone else. 

Some readers have surely had their own moments of such feelings in response to these posts about my efforts. While I am aiming to help and connect, my efforts surely may irk (less so if I make clear the extent that our efforts are two steps forward and one back at best). On some level, I don’t want to hear it either. My wife and don’t have time for this in our household and want to believe K-12 can just check the learning box for us.

In the wake of the scene at the lake, I sent a text to the mother of my daughter’s friend. I let her know about the encounter, including my loss of temper, as well as her daughter’s sanguine comment about the experience: It’s like I always say—stranger equals danger.

Her mom texted back later to say that her little daughter was regaling the family with a hilarious impersonation of me losing it as the stranger walked away, which I appreciated. 

Their family has five kids, all of whom have been homeschooled at times, so she has far more experience than I do with educating outside the box. She concluded her text by reassuring me that it wasn’t as unusual as I might be thinking: her husband had been accosted by others who disagreed with his parenting on multiple occasions. While down by the shores of the very same lake. 

I did make a parenting mistake at the lake that day, as I told my daughter while hugging and reassuring her. When I stepped away to move the car, and I saw the well-dressed white lady with the pretty dog, I didn’t see risk, didn’t see danger. Now I know. I have learned. I am aware of the dis-ease in others and am checking my assumptions about stranger benevolence.

Beyond that, I am doubling down on the quest for wild ice and related efforts to supplement my kids’ development, and share about them in these posts. While I don’t want to offend or create unease in others, my mother-bear-separated-from-her-cub adrenaline is also engaged. The experience of life is too precious and the need do better is too acute.

For those who can’t resist the urge to interject, to take their discomfort and go so far as to attempt to override my parenting…well, I will try to be polite, but I also say, bring on the condemnation if they must.

The thing is, those girls, the ones who were immersed in the experience of that wild ice—while the adults who were haunted by warnings from their youth kept their distance—they were the ones exercising their intelligence, the ones making the wise choice. And I think you, reader, know what I mean.

Director’s Cut — Additional Text

Note: The essay is over. Thank you for reading it. A version of the following was included in a rough draft for the purpose of providing context on my upbringing and experience with wild ice, but was cut for length. I am adding as a coda here in case there is interest.

I grew up in the 1970s, decades before the term free range kids. We were so comically free by today’s standards that the kindergarten and first grade version of myself and friends were all like miniature characters in a Sam Peckinpah movie, compared to kids today. The L’il Wild Bunch.

At that age, I lived only two miles away from where my daughter had been playing, near another city lake, which friends and I would cross over in the winter to shorten our walk to school, a walk that was further than you would imagine, given my age, and it being a city, and the 1970s being an era that seemed to mass produce serial killers.

In keeping with our young devil-may-care vibe, friends and I would be radically underdressed for the temperature, happiest if we escaped our houses in unbuttoned thin windbreakers despite arctic cold temperatures.

At some point, there was a couple day stretch of impossibly smooth ice for (which we at the time had no cool name like Wild Ice). We responded to the phenomenon by flinging our metal lunchboxes out onto the ice and watching them glide away, and keep gliding. 

On that first day, I was surprised at lunchtime to open my little thermos and see shards of highly reflective ice floating in my chocolate milk. And then, before taking a first sip, I realized they were actually shards of broken, mirrored glass (such glass being the standard liners at the time). 

I showed my mom when I got home, expressing complete mystification over how the thermos liner could have broken. The next day, armed with a new thermos, we once more reveled in the wild ice, once more sending lunch boxes sliding, crashing, careening across the mirror-like ice.

It was upon opening the thermos on that second day, and once more seeing the dazzling, potentially lethal floating shards that it occurred to me that I was wrong the previous day when I had sworn to my mom that I hadn’t done anything unusual to the lunchbox. (And she, now in her eighties, is learning the shameful truth, though perhaps at the time she hadn’t fully bought my innocence.)

I am happy to say that there was no third day of floating glass in chocolate milk, but I will concede that this may have been the point in my life when I had my first glimmer into the possibility that I wasn’t as smart as I would ideally be to accomplish all I wanted to in life.