I think this may be appropriate today. Someone check the pond on the base to see if it happened again. THE PERFECT FREEZE, Loring AFB, ME, 1972 One November Saturday at a small lake near the base, nature presented me with a perfect freeze that solidified the entire lake six inches thick overnight. As the first significant freeze of the fall, the ice took on a deep, dusky purple hue and lay perfectly smooth across the entire square mile of the lake. I walked gingerly onto the surface with scores of others who had discovered this marvelous event, trying not to slip but venturing farther and farther out, looking deeply into the ice that reflected my image in near-mirror quality. My experience with freezes as a child in the mid-Atlantic region had made me wary of early ice that would groan and then crack loudly, sending a spider web of fissures out from my foothold. Often it would then break beneath me, leaving me wet to the ankles. But this Maine lake held as solidly as a parking lot and supported me without apparent effort. I had never seen such a sight—a solidly frozen expanse of water with a surface as smooth as a pool table, showing nary an imperfection. As more people discovered this perfect freeze, there was a sudden run on ice skates at local sporting goods stores. I managed to find a pair that fit prior to the shelves emptying and hurried back to the lake. The lake soon became a mass of Southern boys wobbling around on our new ice skates, our ankles collapsing out and then in, as we wind-milled our arms in an attempt to stay balanced and try to maneuver in this new environment. The locals glided effortlessly across the surface and even skated backward! How is this possible? I thought. I could barely stand and move slowly in one direction, but the locals went backward as fast as they did forward! By the end of the day, I had managed to skate slowly while falling only occasionally, a stupendous achievement in my view. I couldn’t wait to get back out on the ice the next weekend, perhaps to play rudimentary hockey if I were fortunate in my improvement. But this was not to be. As I discovered, the perfect freeze had been a special and precious event. By the next weekend, there had been a brief thaw and then a refreeze. The thaw allowed the lake ice to buckle and warp, leaving sharp upward thrusts in the surface and producing undulations that spoiled the perfectly level pool table I had found on that first day. The color had also gone from the deep purple of the previous weekend to an opaque milky white as air had been trapped within the ice during the thaw. The perfect freeze had been made possible by a steep temperature drop that froze the lake deeply and quickly from a fully liquid state. It could not have happened if the freeze had been less severe or had taken effect gradually; it had to be steep and quick. Now we would have to put up wooden siding around an impromptu hockey rink and fill it with water to freeze smoothly, a bothersome effort I had not anticipated. Winter snows also had to be cleared from the ice in small rink-sized patches. The entire lake would no longer beckon skaters as it had after the perfect freeze; we would have to make do with the small patches. Never again did the lake provide the perfect freeze of that first day. Only now, nearly forty years later, can I appreciate what a special event I was watching at the time. (Excerpt from “Flying the Line, and Air Force Pilot’s Journey,” now an e-book.) Janet Stones photo of nurse Millie, Bob Cogliano, and me with the camera around my neck on frozen pond.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:25:28 +0000
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