by Davey Weathercock
Canada and Snow Gesse winter over on Cayuga Lake feeding in the cornfields during the day, and returning in the evenings to the lake. Because the lake is so deep, the lake just about never freezes over, but ice forms early on the shallow North end of the lake and often lingers well into April: the weidrest month, the month of clashing seasons, the between-time, when moist warm air ecounters the ice, forming a heavy fog that, in the absence of wind, just hangs there. I went ice fishing there one fifty degree day in April twenty some years ago, when there was such a thick fog that I couldn’t see the shore once I was a dozen paces out onto the ice, and I would not have noticed the holes that other fishermen had augered into the ice had there not been someone sitting on an upended spackle bucket by each of them, or had they
Metaphysical Times, Vol XIV, no. 1, page 4
not left a red-flaged tip-up rig … and then I stepped in one left by someone who had taken their tackle and gone on someprevious day. Ordinarly, at least in mid winter, such a hole would have frozen over in one night, but I had rubber bottom duck boots on and didn’t get wet. So, being that it was an abandoned hole, it was now mine. I set my tip-up, baited it with a sardine, and stood watching it for a while, but soon grew bored staring into that dark hole, so I wandered off, watching my feet, being careful not to step in another hole. I was going away from shore but figured that I would easily enough find my way back by heading for the sound of country music on one of the fishermans’ radio. On I went, barely able to see my own feet, the sound of the radio becoming faint, but It was good in the wilderness of that cloud to feel so away from it all. And then: such a furious explosion of sound that it seemed to come from within me …. as if I were a Boeing 747 taking off …. and I say Boeing 747, not just in a desperate reach for an appropriate analogy, but becuse at that moment, and without the lag of thought, I invol-