Still, there is one thing I love more than snow: Ice!
Every year I hope we will have an unseasonably cold fall, one that makes the kids cover their ears when they walk to school and makes dogs lift their legs higher until their paws are used to the cold ground. More importantly I hope for temperatures that make the lakes freeze rock solid overnight.
There is nothing quite so magical as sitting on an old dock, strapping on your Nordic skates, stepping over yellowed reeds by the shoreline and striding out in the middle of the lake, a place you can usually only reach by boat.
On a good year, the ice will be clear and you can see weeds and even fish beneath your feet. You get an eerie sense of walking on water. Or rather, flying on water. There is so little resistance, just your blade against the ice, that you quickly gather speeds you can’t even come close to on skis. You’re practically weightless, emotionally limitless.
For me it all began some 40 years ago in Stockholm, Sweden. Nordic skating isn’t called Nordic skating for nothing. In Sweden, everybody does it. (And, of course, there it isn’t referred to as Nordic skating but long distance skating.)
I was no more than five or six years old the first time those long blades were strapped to my winter boots (we didn’t have the fancy blades and ski boots we now have), and the whole family headed out on Lake Mälaren for a day on the lake. Lake Mälaren, a spiderlike lake with its main body in the city, and its many legs reaching far into the suburbs and outskirts, can be accessed from almost anywhere in the Stockholm vicinity. Municipal trucks plow the shoreline of the lake in the winter, making endless skate paths.
I remember the lake of my childhood as always busy. Serious competitive skaters flew by in one quick fluid motion. Others skated while pushing strollers or carrying babies in backpacks. But all the people on the ice, without exception, had one thing in common – they carried red and white plastic awls around their necks, with a small white whistle attached to it.
The awls fit into a holder (so as not to stab you to death if you fell). Each one was wrapped around a strap that came undone when you released it. Quickly yanked from their holders, the awls became clawed extensions of your hands, making it easy to pull yourself out of a hole in the ice.
One more thing that signified the Swedish skaters was that everybody carried a backpack – even those not lugging a baby around. The packs were filled with things like hot chocolate and liverwurst and cucumber sandwiches as well as dry clothes packed in watertight bags.
As a child, I thought nothing of it. But now I find it amazing that a number of people I knew actually did fall through the ice on their Sunday outings, yet this was not a cause to keep young children off the lakes.
One time, as he skated too close to the yeast factory – where warm water was released into the bay – my father fell through. Though tiny trees had been stuck in the ice to warn people off the area, my father, ever the showoff, skated too close. He quickly pulled himself up, stripped naked right there on the ice (we’re talking about Sweden, after all) and put on dry clothes, before getting back on his skates.
All the years I skated on Lake Mälaren as a child, I never fell through. However, in high school, we were once made to jump into a hole in the ice with our clothes on, then save ourselves with the awls. Now there’s a survival-of-the-fittest society for you. Can you imagine all the lawsuits parents would file if their children were required to do that in phys ed class?
I remember my body’s confusion as the ice water seeped through my clothes and hit my skin. My brain screamed “hot, hot!” as I tried to scramble up the edge of the ice to avoid getting scalded to death. Then the true knowledge hit – “No, not hot! Cold!” It was all the inspiration I needed to fly out of that hole. A sauna never felt better.
Here in the northwoods of Wisconsin, I know of no municipally plowed lakes. In fact, Nordic skating feels a little like illicit skateboarding. You have to sneak around trying to find places to skate. When we do find a quiet lake somewhere, we tend to keep its location to ourselves, clandestinely sneaking through the woods to get there.
As much as the Swedish Nordic skating experience contributed to my love of the sport, the seclusion of a quiet lake in the woods away from everybody is infinitely more attractive to me than any big city skating experience in which you have to share the ice with everybody and his grandmother.
So when the sky turns gray in the late fall, I pray that the snow will hold off, so I will get a few solitary weeks on the lake, flying weightlessly across the glassy surface, the wind in my face, listening to the ice singing its mournful winter songs.
Eva Apelqvist lives, writes, skates, skis, bikes, runs and hikes in northwest Wisconsin. She is a full-time freelance writer and the author of Swede Dreams, a young adult novel (Penguin, 2007). For more about Apelqvist, visit www.evaapelqvist.citymax.com.