On Frozen Blog

There was a bittersweet beauty to my arrival into Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday afternoon aboard a half-filled 737. Our descent seemed quite low quite a bit out from the Madison airport, which afforded me some breathtaking views out onto that region’s famed collection of enormous lakes, all of which from a few thousand feet seemed perfectly frozen.

I wanted my own Chesley Sullenberger  (Canadian, of course) piloting my plane, and, moved like me by the frozen beauty outside our plane’s windows, to make a heroic landing on one of the enormous lakes and allow me out onto a wing of our aircraft for a mid-afternoon skate. (Yes, I had skates in my overhead carry-on.)

But the reality is that such giant lakes are topped off by insidiously thin layers of ice at this time of year. I knew this partly because of the conspicuous absence of any recreation out on them, by ice fishers or shinny stars. The sun is strengthening now, and extending its poisonous change-of-season reach for longer periods of time onto our winter playgrounds.

March madness, I think of it.

But from my airplane perch for approximately 15 blissful minutes Wednesday afternoon I could pretend I was being afforded an aerial tour of some of America’s most beautiful shinny stops. Gracious but they were gorgeous! Massive acreage of massive grey hardening, all with snow-crusted shores. From the vantage of four or five thousand feet, any imperfections authored by early spring went undetected.

Checking local weather as any veteran business traveler would, I knew that Madison was slated for a couple of single-digit dips the next few nights. A temporary reprieve from that saddest of executions: the spring melt.  

There are some lucky regions where the skating is not yet slushy or altogether impossible. (Montreal, northern Maine, for instance.) But all too widespread these days are greening ballfields and budding trees. Any day now I will be returned to my battery of hayfever meds and longing for a good hard freeze.

I was so moved by the beautiful breadth of these ice-covered bodies that I searched for their names and data on line in my hotel room not long after I checked in. Lake Mendota is some 10,000 acres big. Lake Monona is about 3,000 acres, as is Lake Kegonsa. Koshkonong Lake is 10,500 acres. Lake Waubesa is the runt of the litter at 2,000 acres. I fell in love with each and every one of them, and promised to visit again — during darker days.