Granted, this was not a hike but a truck-and-wander-walk along the Susquehanna River in late January. I wanted to spend some time with the river ice that, these days, is all too brief. Its appearance on the river came after a week of brutally cold air that settled in a dip of Arctic air from the north. It doesn't happen much anymore, what with climate change and all. I miss it. River ice has a special place in the memories of my youth - of daring forays out to pressure ridges and busting holes to drop a line baited with a live minnow. A time when we could actually ice skate on frozen ponds all winter and ice fish in the ice-locked Tydings Marina.
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| Shield Lichen |
Eight or more inches of snow had sunken down to about six inches underlaid with ice. Amos and I scooted carefully right up next to a shore-bound ridge of ice. As I stopped to scan for birds, a lead began to open between the pressure ridge and a blue-green slate of toothy ice. Just like that. In minutes the lead was flowing and went from a few feet to almost twenty feet wide. I stood wide-eyed while Amos began to pull and whine. Ice was beginning to move. I thought that maybe under the sounds of scratching and screeching, the ice had something deeper to say, in tones that only dogs could hear.
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| Wrightsville Lock |
As long as we wandered a distance away from the shore or above it walking the path across the wall at the Wrightsville Lock, Amos was fine, but up close and next to the edges of the floe, he was uneasy, whining, ears tucked back. I heard sounds of ice creaking and groaning. He heard something more unsettling. A moan? A subsonic set of booms?
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I'd just heard a story on the news about a large group of ice fishermen who got stranded on one of the Great Lakes when a shelf sheered from the shore-fast ice and began to drift, wind-blown out in to the open, frigid water. The Coast Guard came in and swooped them all off their precarious perches. Someone on the walkway across the Wrightsville Bridge was dropping rocks out on the river ice. How many ice dams have happened here? How many have broken loose and taken out bridges as they went. A hundred years ago, lots. Now, river ice is a spectacle, an occasion and a curiosity.
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| Wrightsville-Columbia Bridge |
Ice scours the trees that line the towpath. Some of the big old scars are at least a century old the bigger sycamores and enormous red maples that line the flooded canal. It was repeated ice floods that tore the canal apart from here to Havre de Grace in the 1800s and early 1900s. The river trees that weren't swept away with homes, lockhouses, bridges, and warehouses are still around to tell the tale. How they survived repeated year-upon-year of winter ice floods is beyond me, yet here they are.
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| Highpoint looking upriver to Wrightsville/Columbia |
Annie Dillard wondered why anyone would look downstream at time past and not upstream instead, where "Here it comes!" with a promise time yet to come. A prayer for a gift of time, she quotes Merton in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "Lord! Give us time!" We stopped at Highpoint Park and walked the circle path that spirals around the summit. It is full of drifted snow, blown from north-facing slopes to the east-facing slope. It's deep. Amos was very happy to be this high above the river even though he was post-holing up to his shaved, bare belly. I reminded myself with a voice-note to be sure to hike a section of Tinker Creek this year down in Roanoke on the Appalachian Trail, a pilgrimage to the Pilgrim and her book, published fifty years ago this year. Who wants to go?
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| Poppy's Lunch Rock |
Before long we trudged around the spiral path to Waystop #5 and gawked at the drifts, beautiful and etched by wind. In summer, two years ago my (now 19!) grandchild Koda and I pushed Poppy in his wheelchair all the way up the spiral path so he could see the river coming and going. We stopped here in the warm sun to eat a picnic of pork fried rice and egg rolls from his favorite Asian food stop in Long Level, the River House. How can have been two years already? "Give us time!" I'm with you, Annie. I get it, Tom.
One more return to the riverside and Amos refused to get out of the truck, but that okay. I stopped long enough to get a few more pictures, some reference shots for a nature journal sketch of the day. I waved across the river at where I though the Blue Rock Boat Launch might be in case there were any friends on the other side checking out the birds sheltering on the open water behind the sand islands.
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| Creaking and popping at Shank's Mare |
A nice older gentleman out for a walk came up behind me and asked who I was waving at. "Maybe my friend Sarah if she's over there doing what I'm doing over here." He began to wave with me but then with a booming voice shouted "HI SARAH!" Amos jumped up from his nap in the truck and began to holler out the open window. If all of the Lancaster side of the river across from Shank's Mare didn't hear both of them, I'd be surprised.
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Notes:
2024 is the 5oth anniversary of the publication of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Annie Dillard who is no longer doing public speaking or answering letters and emails, states on her website that she doesn't have time for any of this anymore because there's too much she wants to read and concentrate on. I get that, too. https://www.anniedillard.com/
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