Listening to the Ice Move

It's unseasonably warm today, and, unfortunately, seasonably sticky, assuming the season for the latter is a Minnesota summer. I decided a remedy to Daddy's sleeping all day long would be to bundle him in the car and take a drive up to Crex Meadows to see what spring has brought.
The trip itself depended on weather, of course, and it was forecast to be perfect for such an expedition: a bulk of several afternoon hours between thunderstorms.

These days it's even more of an event than, say, last year. One O2 bottle, for example, would have sufficed then. Today he went through both and still ran out by the time he had to walk into the house. Then though it's very warm and he'd be inside the car the whole time, he insisted on having his hat. No jacket, but the more I insisted he didn't need the hat either the crabbier he became.

He got his hat.

I lost half my view out the side window.

This hat is a straw hat with a wide brim and a green plastic visor/shade extending well out over the front. I presume it's like portable sunglasses for the hat wearer. For the person nearby, it's an obstacle. Whatever.

Driving into Wisconsin, we saw the last of the snow for this season - we hope. There were mounds left in large parking lots and where there had been drifts under the north side of dense trees. Ice on the ponds is mostly or all melted, depending on their size. Ice on lakes is very black, and very broken up.

Since this is about ice, I won't bore you with trumpeter swans sightings, or sandhill cranes, harrier hawks, Canada geese, loons, mallards, buffle heads, redwing blackbirds, courting frogs, pussy willows, bad roads, or any of the other things the camera and I found interesting. These are common at Crex. But there was one thing that was new to me today.

I always go by Phantom Lake when I enter the area. Today there were few birds there since the lake was still mostly ice covered. However, as I proceeded through, I soon realized it wasn't as simple as a solid sheet. The lake was covered by a combination of large solid sheets and areas covered in floating ice bits. If you sorted out the textures for a bit, you could soon easily tell which was which.

Especially if you stood still.

There was a stiff south wind blowing, and the large sheets were moving north, pushing their way between other sheets through gaps of open water left from other sheets moving by. The big sheets were in turn pushing the small bits out of their way, and where gaps were narrow, that meant pushing them up onto adjoining sheets.

Where the bits floated on the water, they were as black as the big sheets, just lumpy and uneven in texture. Where they got pushed up out of the water, they instantly turned white, even in the lower light levels of a still very cloudy day. And if you were very quiet, with the car engine turned off and conversation stilled, you could hear the gentle tinkling of the ice bits colliding and shoving and piling up.

Good ears of course helped. Daddy no longer can hear soft things with higher pitches, so he missed the ice music. While he sat and watched the large sheets move, I stood, and photographed, and listened. Just listened.

And wished I'd thought to bring the camcorder too.