Page 79 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

had melted away. Kyle wore a light jacket and blue canvas boat shoes. We took pictures of each

other with our phones as we opened each shanty door, sat on curving cedar benches, ran our hands

along decorative carvings, and admired stained glass windows.

From inside one house, Kyle looked out at me through a perfect cutout of a large geometric fish.

Above the fish, carved circles of all sizes represented air bubbles. Closing the door of the house

across from him, I sat down inside and looked out onto the empty field. A memory of my mother

arose: She stood at the stove in our galley kitchen, battering and frying to a golden crisp the tiny

smelt my grandfather had caught that day on a frozen Lake Champlain. Her back was to us as she

dipped the fish by their tails into flour and egg batter, and then dropped them into hot oil in the skillet.

I could almost taste the crispy fried batter, could almost see the little golden headless fish draining

on brown paper lunch bags next to the stove.

The Shelburne museum sits astride Lake Champlain, the sixth largest lake in the United States. Last

winter, once again, it did not freeze over. Even the bays, usually solid enough to skate and fish on,

were thought to be too precarious for fishing shanties. From 1860 to 1930, there was only one year

that the lake, 120 miles long and 12 miles across at its widest point, did not completely freeze over.

After that, each decade included multiple years when the lake did not freeze completely. The 1990s

were a turning point. For seven winters the lake remained open, and in the first decade of the new

century, only half of the winters saw a solid stretch of ice between Vermont and its far shore in

upstate New York.

Inside one of the artists' fishing shanties crafted of memory and imaginings, I sat on a bench and

looked down at the hole in the floor where the ice would be cut. My gaze turned out the window to

February’s grass, and I understood what it might mean to lose the full experience of a season in my

lifetime. When I was Kyle's age, I could never have imagined such a thing.

It is now nearing the end of January 2017, and Lake Champlain is open for the fifth winter since

2010. So far, only three days have registered below the average temperature for the month. Most

have ranged much higher, as much as 27 degrees above the historical average; January 12 came in

at 54 degrees Fahrenheit. Today, far from the lake, in the hills of eastern Vermont where I live, fat

flakes of snow blow chaotically, then turn to ice that pings onto windows, and then transforms to rain

that coats white spruce trees in a frosting of ice. A symphony of silence, a chorus of ice, a tympany