WELLFLEET — We hear from Jacob Dalby on the fourth cold day. He’s been scouting ponds. The deep ones are still wide open, but the small, shallow ones are beginning to freeze. One more cold night and the ice thickens: solid, clear, even.
The next afternoon we bushwhack in — there’s no road to this little pond — stooping beneath arched blueberries and swatting aside huckleberries until finally we see the flat black expanse. The kids sit on milk crates while we parents lace up skates. Sarah Smith warms her hands with her breath; “I have hot chocolate if you need it,” says Shannon Bertrand. I pull out a last jar of Christmas eggnog and we pass it around. Anyone who has extra skates has brought them, and once we get laced up, the sticks come out and the echoing sounds of carving blades and thwacking pucks begins.
It is simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, the ferocity of our love for winter here. We adults know cold — we learned not only how to endure it but how to love it as kids. We had to. Now, though, true winter visits only now and then. Every one of us on the pond today has rearranged things to be here this afternoon because who knows how long the ice will last?
It’s been four years since I skated last. Our daughter Sally was nine then, and up until then had skated with Alex and me every winter; her sister, Nora, was only six. They’ve been on indoor rinks, though, and they remembered fast.
I want to share this joy with my girls, teach them these winter skills. But even as I do, I wonder: Will they remember the lacing of skates, the gliding, the deep color of the pond, the steamy mugs of hot cocoa when they’re older? Will they need to?
When I first moved here 20 years ago, we skated across Long Pond in endless winding arcs. Joe Wanco had a barbeque grill going on the ice and ladled out hot chocolate from a big pot simmering over the fire; Dan Silverman propelled himself across the ice with some sort of sail on skates.
Now our skating days are rare. We might get three days of skating, but then the temperature begins to rise again, the top layer of ice becoming slush, and the thin spots more and more dangerous. We have other rituals that we’re learning for these warming winter waters: cold plunges, midday swims. We’ll adapt, as we always do.
But this week, for a few bone-cold afternoons, we do it the old way: back crossovers and elated sprints slowly turning the ice from smooth black to joy-etched white, bundled bodies trundling home in the fading light.
