My hometown is a small remote place in Northern Ontario, Canada. You’d be hard-pressed to find it on a map, it’s one of those places where you can still subsist on the land (to an extent); things like hunting and fishing are normal parts of every day life, and people plan their groceries around how much wild fish, deer, moose or partridge they have in their freezer.
As romantic as that might sound, it was also the type of place where kids grew up losing friends to the hard edges of nature, enough so that it was common-place that you’d lost someone you knew or heard of through school and high school. Sadly I can count a number of people we "lost" from grade school up through high school.
This is a recounting of one of several times that not taking the environment we lived in seriously enough nearly cost me my life. Sometimes, no matter how careful you are, it’s unavoidable, if you’re extra careful in those situations you might get away light by losing a digit, ending up with some nice new scars, or getting hospitalized for a little while.
When I was around 15 years old I went through the ice, it was late at night, overcast, and one of the fastest ways to get to and from town in the dead of Winter is to use your snowmobile to ride across the frozen lakes and trails to get wherever it is that you’re heading. On this specific night, I was heading home from the movies and a bit of a late night in a coffee shop, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with friends. By the time I started to head home, it was dark, overcast, and what little light was left was being swallowed by the clouds and deep dark night. Coming through the trails, I hit the lake system my family lived on just as I lost what little light had been left to me and I found myself without bearings deep in the Northern Ontario wilderness.
Panic hadn’t kicked in yet, or maybe it had and I just refused to accept it. It was clear in my head that the time I had been riding without seeing any familiar landmarks meant I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. I was on the lakes, but there were no lights on the shores, there were no docks or familiar clearly lit windows of houses along the shoreline as far as I could see. The softly drifting snow, falls in sheets, and forms layers and layers of haze that plays tricks on your eyes in the dark. Your eyes fight to focus on the far off distance but are continually dragged back to the beam of your headlight where the lights bounce off the falling snow, like sitting next to camp-fire in the deep dark, your sight is limited to the small area that the light can reach.
In order to try and get a bit better idea of where I was, to try and find some bearings or some landmark that I could steer by, whether it was the bend of a turn in the lake, a point I had passed many times before, an island, anything, I stopped my snow machine, turned off the lights and walked out away from it. The idea being that my eyes were struggling because of the light from the headlights on the machine, so if I stepped away and let my eyes adjust I might just be able to make something out that I recognize through the murky white snowy soup and the darkness.
As my eyes started to adjust to the dark, I went straight down through the ice.
If you’ve ever lived anywhere cold like Northern Ontario, you would know that you can dress for minus 30 Celsius, generally, you can be pretty comfortable if you pay attention to appropriate layering, covering exposed skin, etc…
All those layers though, sopping wet in near frozen water, are a whole different story, and in a lot of cases, a quick way to meet your maker.
As I fell I had managed to twist just enough to catch my arm on the lip of the hole I had created. The last ditch move hadn’t saved me from a thorough soaking, but it had kept me from going under and getting stuck under the ice, or sinking like a lead balloon. I couldn’t feel the bottom of the lake under my boots, so there was a good chance if I had gone under it would have been a struggle to find my way back to the opening.
Slowly, I dragged myself up onto the ice from out of the hole, the heavy leathers I was wearing weighed as much as a whole other person wrapped around me. I was trying to remain calm, hoping that the ice I was worming my way onto and across wouldn’t give way under me, if the water was as deep as I suspected it would have taken a lot more effort to get to the surface without the leverage of a solid edge.
A few feet away from the hole I gambled on making it to my snow machine, limping along in my slush-filled, fast-freezing gear. The leathers I was wearing, around my knees and arms started cracking as the water turned to ice in the cold air and my movement broke some of it free. My hand landed on the bar across the back of the track of the snow-machine, thankfully still running and hauled the backend of the snow-machine 90 degrees to point it away from where I had fallen through, hopped on, and gunned it to get away from there as quickly as possible.
My entire tact changed from "get home" to "get anywhere" in the span of what had been less than a minute. My eyes scanned the horizon for any sign of a house-light, any sign of a road, an opening in the tree-line that might be hiding a house set back from the shoreline that I could find safety in, but there was nothing. To keep myself going I was letting off a stream of swear words into the inside of my helmet but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the fact my feet were starting to lose sensation, and the shift from the cold painful sting of wet socks to a dull numb-ness in my feet and legs was starting to trigger panic.
The moment I caught sight of a hazy yellow light in the dark I nearly lost my mind. By this point, the cold was working its way up my legs, and my teeth were uncontrollably chattering in my head, my jaw was in pain from trying to clench my teeth to dampen the chattering, it felt like someone had wound my jaw with rubber bands in every direction for all the good it did me, trying to keep my teeth from feeling like they were going to rattle out of my head.
Shore came fast, and I drove straight up to the door that the light sat above and hammered on the door. I was in tears, everything hurt, it had been almost an hour since I had fallen through the ice. Mentally I was preparing myself to break into the house if no one answered when the door swung open and light flooded out onto the patch of packed driveway snow I was occupying. I can’t even imagine what I looked like.
All I could manage to say through my chattering teeth was something along the lines of "I fell through, I can’t feel my feet". I’m not even sure what I think I said actually came out as anything more than a muffled, chattering noise.
My memory is pretty hazy after that point, once I had made it through the door my body must have swapped out the last reserves of adrenaline I had been running on for an acute case of shock.
My dad picked me up in his truck, but I don’t remember how long it was before he got there. There must have been a considerable amount of time, it’s all more or less gone in my brain, or never registered in the first place. There’s a part of me that remembers him being upset, but I don’t remember words, and I think he was as scared as I was if not more. I don’t remember the car journey home, or how long it took.
I didn’t even know whose house I had actually ended up at.
To this day I still have periodic nightmares about standing in the middle of a frozen lake, the only thing I can see is the hazy outline of the tips of the pines off in the distance along the edge of where they grew from the shore of some island up to meet the dark night sky. Everything else is black. The only sounds are the crunching of the snow under my boots and the dull echoes and crackles of ice settling and shifting under my feet, like far off thunder underwater. Paralyzed with fear, and scared to run in any direction in case I fall through, I stand stock still hoping for the moon, or stars to break out of the clouds and give me a path to shore.
There’s an immense amount of guilt in me for what that experience must have been like for my parents. Living in Northern Ontario or any remote Northern Community in Canada comes with a weird acceptance that these things could and will happen, and if you live your life without a hefty amount of respect for the surrounding wilderness, they’re likely to happen sooner rather than later. In a lot of cases though, it’s unfortunately inevitable.
I was far from the first to go through the ice, but I was one of the lucky ones that didn’t lose their lives because of it. Unfortunately, the home that I had ended up at that night, they hadn’t been so lucky with their own son years before.
Here I had been, standing on their doorstep in the middle of the night, drenched and frozen, in pretty bad shape, like a ghost out of time. The well of guilt I feel for the horror of emotions they must have had to relive because of my carelessness. My poor decision to leave it so late getting home. I’ll forever be indebted to them, least of which for leaving that porch light on. They took me in, gave me dry clothes, called my parents and probably more I don’t even realize and can’t remember. There’s not much else I could possibly say really that would explain how much gratitude I feel to those people, and how bad I feel for what I must have inflicted on them.
My dad went back for the snow machine the next day and tried to find where I had gone through, he couldn’t find a trace of where I’d been or where I had come from, or how I had strayed so far from the trail home. The falling snow had covered over my tracks, and if he couldn’t find it in broad daylight, if I hadn’t had caught my arm, it’s likely they would have found my snow machine, but wouldn’t have found whatever was left of me until the next Spring.