Stacks of silver coins

It's been said that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow -- that they live with it so intimately they distinguish its every texture, form, nuance and variation. Well, it turns out the first part of that sentence, about the hundreds of words, isn't true, but I'll bet the other half is: to the keen observer, snow isn't simply white stuff.

So it can be with ice, specifically lake ice. Here on Birch Lake near Harshaw, warm weather back a week or so melted some of the 6- to 8-inch cover we had going into the New Year. Some new light snow has fallen since then, but the wind has moved it around, sweeping scattered patches bare. Looking out from the living room window, I find myself wanting to go take a close look and those bare spots.

Ever since I was a kid, skating on the frozen river near my home in Two Rivers, I've enjoyed examining ice. I remember glorious days when friends and I skated on ice clear as a sheet of glass. I've enjoyed such days with my kids, too, gliding along, looking down on rocks and gravel, exploring tangles of sunken branches, skating right atop a small school of redhorse suckers swimming at full speed, trying to flee in fright.

The features of the ice itself were fascinating, too -- the cracks that revealed its thickness; rippled, washboard areas where wind kept the ice from freezing smooth, translucent patches where an incoming spring mixed and stirred the water.

What I liked (and still like) best were the stacks of coins. Have you seen this? The ice is clear, several inches thick, and there's a stack of silver-white bubbles fixed in it, each the size of a quarter or half-dollar, an eighth-inch or so apart. How does this happen? Well, you generally see this over shallow water. There has to be a source of air, such as a plant still respiring down on the bottom and sending up oxygen, or something in the mud decaying and releasing bubbles of gas.

One cold night a skin of ice forms over the lake. The next day the sun shines through and whatever process is at work sends up tiny bubbles that collect against the ice's underside, forming one larger bubble, flat like a coin. The next cold night makes the ice a little thicker and traps that bubble in its matrix. The next day another bubble forms. And so it goes. The result is purely beautiful, especially when struck by a low sun from east or west.

Next time out on your lake (if it's not covered by snow), look closely at the ice. You'll discover a richness and variety much like what the Eskimos surely have come to see in snow.