The rule of thumb states that the lake is safe to walk on when the ice is four inches thick. It occurs to me to question a supposed miracle: when Jesus walked on water, was it mid-winter? Was it in Northern Michigan? Google, like God, is omniscient, and informs me: no, the carpenter’s boy didn’t even wet his sandals when he sauntered over the warm waves of the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a lake). My next inquiry: could a carpenter build a dock that takes a man out over the water? His son perhaps? Could said dock stand flush with the lake’s surface to stage a miracle?
My doubts and cynicism revolve around all things that are wonderful. It’s why I am never fully enraptured by a slice of chocolate cake. Even as my eyes roll into my head with pleasure and my legs go weak at the knees, I allow myself to spoil the bliss of rich frosting on my tongue, disrupting the simple joy of a treat with thoughts of calories, weight gain, diabetes, and whether I am infringing on my up-and-down efforts to remain vegan. If I were the son of God, I would do more than walk on water, which is easy in Michigan in early February. I would turn water into wine, perhaps. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would make rich, chocolate cake a health food of the highest dietary merit. I would feed the masses with frosting as thick as 4-inch ice, icing that melts on the tongue.
On Valentine’s Day, I recall I am alone. I look around and witness a white world locked in sub-zero. I drop the heart-shaped chocolates that I bought for myself into the lake. One by one, they plop into the cavity that I struggled tooth and nail to bore into the ice. I recall my partner, his insistence that marriage was pointless, that we’d be together forever without laws or papers to validate our love. I watch my breath, each exhale his ghost. I see the waning vapor that rises upward, spreads, and disintegrates. It brings to mind the things we lose. I remember how he left me.
Last spring, when the ice became wet, a terrific blaze of neon radiated from its sunshine sweat. The frozen crust of the lake was judged to be six inches thick, perhaps eight, strong enough to walk across for another few weeks. I didn’t want to be a downer about it, casting my cynicism. No, I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, a warm jacket seeped in snow-melt. I didn’t want to dash the chocolate cake into the fan, to fabricate disaster from a fine dessert, which after its decimation looks little different from a great splatter of shit. I didn’t want to let my partner, who I thought of as a husband after all of our years together, be brought low by my elevated anxieties.
Rule of thumb: the lake is safe to walk on when the ice is four inches thick. It occurs to me, now, to question this supposed “wise” precaution. How many partners must we lose to accept this sage advice?
I have always been fond of the equinox, the balance of light and dark that falls on two sides of the calendar year. In September, the earthy smell of dead leaves. In March, the sterile smell of ice-melt, and on warmer days, a hint of soil thawing beneath the snow. The sun rises, sure as my cynicism, which according to my mother, I inherited from my father, a stubborn man who was neither a god nor a carpenter, but a car salesman and a hopeless drunk.
As the new day rises to out-duel my obstinate will to stare it down, as an orange ball of fire burns away my eyes, I cast down my angry glare to the ice at my feet. Slick with sweat, it shimmers gold, writhing eels reflecting the morning sky. It is slippery. It is soft. But I know, despite the occasional crack that sounds like a leviathan stirring from its lake-bottom crypt, that this time of year the ice is still four inches thick.
I know the rule of thumb that swears I am safe. But I am a cynic at heart. So I wait it out. I stand my ground on the slippery surface of the lake. If not today, then tomorrow. In the end, I will join my partner. I may be a cynic, but I believe in love. I know that beneath this ice there are bonds more eternal than marriage.