March 9, 2023 at 2:19 p.m.
The Lake Where You Live
Into reverse
By Ted Rulseh-
On the lake the snow is deep but doesn't overtop my boots. I trudge a hundred yards or so down the shoreline and then stop to look around. The trails of animals, narrow trenches in the snow instead of strings of distinct prints, zigzag and criss-cross. Otherwise the surface lies smooth.
The temperature is in the mid-30s; I feel the heat of the afternoon sun. This is, or should be, a turning point. Since early December the ice beneath my feet has thickened and the snow has piled higher, though set back by an occasional thaw.
Now it's time for both to start their inexorable retreat. The earth's orbital travel has tilted our hemisphere toward the sun. The melting will be slow at first because the lake's stark white reflects some 90 percent of the sun's heat back to the atmosphere. It will take seriously warm air to accelerate the thaw.
Any day now that will arrive, and the ice will begin to soften and decline, at a pace faster than the freeze that in three months brought its thickness to about 30 inches. Now even when temperatures remain below freezing, the cold seems to lack that mid-winter fierceness. And when we start dinner it's still midday bright, trees from the point of land west of us throwing a blue-gray shadow across the lake's snow.
What's really different now is the character of the light, especially toward evening. A month ago, looking out our northwest-facing living room windows in the late afternoon, we couldn't see sun, only the blaze of red-orange clouds through the bare branches of trees.
Now the late sun has swung toward the north. We can watch it disappear behind the hill above the little cove a quarter-mile down the shoreline. Until then its beams slant through the windows and brighten the stairway wall.
On clear days the blue of the evening sky no longer carries the tint of ice. It's a warmer blue, a restful tone that brings thoughts of milder, gentler days. And the sunset colors have shifted toward more inviting pale orange and yellow. Better still, this all happens later: We get 40 minutes more of evening daylight than on the first of this month.
I've enjoyed my late-winter afternoon interlude. As four snowmobiles in a line buzz along the trail across the lake, I start for home. I plod up the steps, not the least bit interested in shoveling them again. February has ended. We've turned a corner. We've made it through.
Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, "Ripple Effects," has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.
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