Prologue: Skiing onto the Ice

The lengthened evenings
ring the memories
of future dreams, a dream in rain and ice embraced.
The initiation of trying to be:
Scientist, lover, friend,
conversationalist, mystic, explorer.
Sick of this no-will-be succession
of perverse I-ams.
Betraying an ad-hoc insistence
Betraying a sing-to-me-lullaby identity.
And I am thinking
my tent erected in theLindenhof
a colorless sunset
in a place I-believe-I-think-I-know
I’m here
—Steven Kubacki, 1976

 

February 19, 1978

I’ve set my skis to the west, weaving through rattling pines where ice-laden branches can be heard quivering in the bitter wind. Undeterred, my tracks break past this last defense of life and cross the snow-covered sand to the ice. Ice floes have drifted onto the beach for weeks, crashing, piling themselves high in December and January. Now, in February, they have fused into an expansive wasteland that extends miles into Lake Michigan.

This is dead winter, and I can’t see another living being. Later in the day, a few students like me might cross-country ski through the fields, over fences and dunes, to the edge of the frozen lake. I did this as often as I could, compelled by a desire to transcend the academic borders of bland discovery. The bleak and loveless snow offered a scholastic antithesis.

I almost never met people on the lake at this time of morning, however, and that was good. Those drawn to these early hours had either departed south to vegetate in the sun, or they were here hibernating in the fortresses of fear and love we call homes. Only fools ventured across the frozen plains now, because the chance of vanishing until spring was a risk few would dare.

At twenty-three, my concept of mortality is abnormally heightened. I have faced death many times before. Each one prepared me for this moment.

Patterned by serpentine gusts of wind, the snowy expanse stretches on until it meets the distant horizon. In between, the ice rises, shaped by the waves of the lake. That same force, as powerful as gravity, wind, and earth, pushes me forward now.

Just past the line where the water, had it still been water, would meet the shore, a ridge rises in the outline of a bell, five meters above the lake’s surface. Beyond, a half mile distant, is another ridge, twice as high, a towering juxtaposition of angular blocks and jutting triangles—massive and treacherous. The protrusions cast by shifting ice and drifting snow are sculpted like sandstone carvings in the wind.

Overhead, the pale February sun does little to dull the cutting cold, yet at first, I hardly notice it. My mind and my heart are focused on what lies ahead. My arms extend and push off the poles, my knees bent and my torso crunched, my weight shifting from one leg to the next. A familiar rhythm develops.

The frozen ground whispers warnings as I slide onto it, the shifting of unseen forces. Now, moving into my rhythm, I gain speed, one ski chasing the other. The pitted surface of the frozen lake evokes a sense of lunar desolation.

I picture myself as a lone astronaut, beyond the brink of civilization, abandoned, skiing into the shadow of a serrated ice shelf. The morning has grown colder, and the wind cuts cruelly through my clothes, numbing my skin. A part of me enjoys this elemental coldness. Another aspect of me pushes me to keep going, relentless and unwavering.

I have an eerie feeling of being watched—that someone or something has eyes on me. No matter how far I get from the lonely shoreline and the sleepy college town I deplore, I feel this presence.

Perhaps it is the spirit of the place itself, which some call the Michigan Triangle. This corner of the country has a reputation. Locals have claimed to see strange lights in the sky at night, and there were whispers about animals walking upright through dense shoreline forests. Venture too far on the concentric rings of winter ice, some said, and who knows what you might encounter. The schooner Thomas Hume and its crew of seven vanished here in 1891, and thirty years later, the two-masted Rosabelle would be found floating, bottom up, in calm waters. There was no storm reported or sign of a collision, but the eleven men who had set sail were missing and never found. Then Captain George Donner of the O.S. McFarland freighter retired to his stateroom one night in 1937 and disappeared. His crew swore under oath that the door was locked from the inside and the porthole was far too small for a man to squeeze through. When Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 vanished over the Michigan Triangle on June 23, 1950, police reported a red orb hovering above the lake.

I didn’t know any of those stories at the time. And it was still years before professor of underwater archaeology Mark Holley discovered in 2007 what looked like a sunken Stonehenge resting on the lakebed, with monoliths that resembled mastodons.

What I did not know does not matter.

The inevitable drives me forward, until I find the place.

Alone on the frozen tundra, I hear a strange sound. It begins like a low-pitched whine carried by the wind, then morphs into a throbbing uproar. I look at the next rampart of ice, wondering if some kind of engine is coming toward me, before realizing that the uncanny sound is coming from my own head—a resonance within—that seems to spread itself like sound waves over the ice.

The sun melts and glazes the surface of the lake, so it looks like shattered pieces of glass that shimmer together, with every jagged detail unique but connected. On the reflections of this endless mirror, diabolical fantasies are released, daring me to join. In the expanding nowhereness, a faint glow begins to fill my peripheral vision.

My mind, steeped in the philosophy of the infinite and mired in the emotional pressure of the past few weeks, is more than primed to perceive the extraordinary. The ice comes to life. I become immobile as great shelves of ice surround and engulf me. In awe, I watch an occurrence I can only call “auroral intensity” unfolding before my eyes.

Over time, my memory of what happened next has undergone several revisions, updated by fragments freed from depths of unintended repression. I remember a seam in the air, a separating of sky from sky, like the parting of thick curtains. I recall a large object above me—or was it just the feeling of an object?

Does the interpretation matter?

Time ceases to exist, and materialization—the physicality the mind demands—does not follow for a while. Rooted to the spot, I am overcome by a kaleidoscope of conflicting possibilities, of hopes and fears I forget one after another. My eyes begin to water uncontrollably, and in the frigid air, I see the hands on my wristwatch. Are they moving?

The ice then cracks, gunshot loud in the still air! A wave of frigid cold envelops me, and I encounter a vague feeling of drifting that seems like forever—or was it only a second?

Imperceptibly, the drifting stops. I remember something like a caressing and rhythmic pressure comforting my body. I sense an avalanche of snowy images—icy thoughts descending like millions of snowflakes. They crash and thunder down the slopes of something shiny like metal into my brain, lights turning off and on at different angles. They seem to be everywhere but hidden, secret, burying me beneath their illuminations, in a complexity I cannot disentangle, cannot even locate—am I under the water, on the ice, in the sky, where? In space? I need an answer.

“Not yet,” I hear someone say but cannot locate. As if I asked but did not.