Thomas Mcguane: Gallatin Canyon

As a test, I went back to delivering my papers on time, but the drum major had forgotten all about me. In January, I skated out onto Lake Erie, which that year was frozen nearly to Canada. I stared at its ominous expanse. I left the shore one evening on my hockey skates, a wool cap pulled over my ears and a long scarf wound around my neck and crisscrossed over my chest beneath my blue navy-surplus pea jacket. I meant to learn courage out on the ice, to avoid the specter of cowardice by skating all the way either to Canada or, if the icebreaker had been through, to the Livingstone ship channel. I struggled over the corrugations of the near-shore ice, then ventured onto glassier black ice that rewarded me with long glides between strokes of my hollow-ground blades. Bubbles could be seen and, occasionally, upended white bellies of perch and rock bass, as the sheen of glare ice, wide as my limited horizon, spread east toward Ontario; I dreamed of landing on this foreign shore, from whence the red-coats once launched sorties against our colonial heroes. I would tell Mrs. Andrews what I had done. Reading schoolbooks had embittered me against the British and the American South, while my uncles handled the job for Germany and Japan. I meant to visit the old British fort at Amherstburg and skate home with tales of imperial ghosts and whatever other secret existences I might discover in places where no human is expected.

Such dreams in the gathering darkness enlivened my skating, and I raced on, stroke after stroke, toward the hiding place of those who once sought to crush our revolution. I would one day see this as the template for many disasters I had much later created for myself, but at the time, risking my life on the same days I worried about paper cuts or infected pimples produced no sense of contradiction. I felt only the allure of the hard, black, and perfect cold-snap ice unblemished by wind during its formation. Impossible to imagine the drum major out here like some animated Q-Tip, I gloated, no prancing among the crows and ice-killed fish.

Except for those crows I was alone out there, out of sight of land or, as I then called it, Michigan, though I knew land lay to the west by the pale sunset still faintly visible. That’s how I thought of it: I can’t see Michigan anymore. I believed that if I let coming darkness turn me back, I would never be any good and the fog of cowardice would forever envelop me.

The ice seemed to rise before me and disappear into the twilight as though they were one and the same; I had to slow down in case the ice came to an end. Lights that had briefly shone on the Michigan shore were gone now, and I had yet to see my first Canadian light or the outlines of the fort I’d imagined. I touched the old compass in my pocket. Then it was dark.

When I stopped to reconnoiter, I felt the cold penetrate and I adjusted my scarf. It was time to go home, I knew, but I couldn’t leave this undone at the first wave of panic. I had to press on into the plain blackness long enough to prove that it was I who elected to return and not those forces determined to make me worthless in my own eyes. Such thoughts produced an oddly inflexible rhythm to my skating, by which I reached my feet through a distance I couldn’t judge by sight until I contacted the hard floor of ice.

Now the sound of my blades, which had seemed to fill the air around me, was replaced by another as murmurous as a church congregation heard from afar. I glided toward the sound when suddenly a vast aggravation of noise and turbulence erupted as a storm of ducks took flight in front of me; it was water. I heard the ominous heave of the lake. I turned to skate straight away — or not quite straight, because after some minutes of agitated effort I found myself at water’s edge again, water sufficiently fraught that it had broken back the edge of ice, heaving it in layers upon itself. I skated away from that too, and, when once more surrounded by darkness and standing squarely on black ice, I stopped and recognized that I was lost. I was suspended in darkness. A step in any direction and I would drown in freezing water.

The feeling of being completely lost was claustrophobic, like being locked in a windowless room. I had an incongruous sense of airlessness; it came to me that I was going to die.

I lashed out first at my entangling fantasies, the hated red-coats especially, the pursuing ostrich — and then against death itself. My bowels began to churn, and I squatted on the ice with the pea jacket over my head, pants around my knees; I recited the Lord’s Prayer in a quavering voice. And I was answered: a deep rhythmic throb that gathered slowly into a rumble. I stood and gazed into the darkness; as I pulled up and fastened my pants, a light emerged, followed by several others, streaming toward me in a line. At the moment the sound was most intense, a black all-consuming shape arose before me. It was not the god I expected: a lake freighter whose wake caused the ice to groan all around me, bound for Lake Superior. The lights streamed away and it was silent again.

I extracted the compass from my pocket and began bargaining with death. If anyone was looking on, it would be clear that whatever benefits I might be entitled to would have to be channeled through the old instrument, in whose tremulous magnetic needle I had placed all my faith. It took some concentration to hold panic at bay and rotate the battered brass case until I had north pinned down; then, staring down at the ornate W through the cloudy glass held just under my nose, I began to skate as rapidly as I could, moving fast on the cold mirror beneath me, creating my own wind, knowing that if the compass didn’t work after its many years in the ground I would skate straight off the ice into a world from which I would not return. Myopic faith kept me stooped over my cupped hands as I pressed on with all I had.

The light of moon and stars was enough to see by if I’d known where I was going; and in a short time I could make out a half dozen squarish shapes in my path, ice fishermen’s shanties. There were several of these little villages in the area, and I tried to figure out which of them this might be. They were all quite similar, small houses placed over a round hole spudded through the ice through which the occupants could angle for perch or hang for hours, iron spear in hand, to await the great pike drawn to their hand-whittled wooden perch decoy. By night, the shacks were all deserted.

But one shanty revealed a flickering light, and to it I attached all my hopes. At its door, I made out voices, and I stopped before knocking. They were voices from my classroom, and I listened as if dreaming to what sounded like a quarrel. First the drum major, cocky and bantering. The other seemed to plead and whimper and was, of course, Mrs. Andrews. And then there were different sounds, less precise than words. I had no business knowing what I knew.

I landed a long way from where I’d put on my skates and was obliged to traverse a considerable distance on my blades, tottering upon pickerel grass, water-rounded glass shards, and pebbles, waving my arms around for balance while thanking everything around me for further days on earth. But in a scrap of tangled beechwoods, these pious thoughts soon crumbled before my lurid new vision. Light from the small houses that lined the narrow road to the shore made of my flailing progress wild shadows in the leafless trees. I heard dogs barking behind closed doors, and one homeowner let his beagle out while watching me from his porch. I tried to manage my movements, but I couldn’t walk normally nor could an observer see that I was wearing skates. The beagle approached to within ten feet and sat down, emitting a single reflexive bark as I passed his lawn. The owner remained on his porch and in silence watched me pass.