Ice-olation 2011

According to custom, it's time to continue my blog:  it's now November 26, 2011, ice-up time on Raspberry Island. For the past 5 days we've been happily stranded on the island by ice that will eventually freeze solid enough to let give us access the real world. This photo was taken this morning. That's Gary behind me, out sloshing in the water along the shore with his rubber boots on, and in the distance you can see a line of unfrozen water on the far side of the lake. The rest is very thin ice.

We had thought we'd be having an early-ish freeze this year, when the lake froze over on November 20th. The outside temperature was 22 degrees Fahrenheit that day, cold enough to freeze the lake, but the wind was too strong and the water remained open. Mid-morning, the wind died down and the waves quieted. They seemed to be thickening as we watched, and within a couple of minutes they turned from dark gray to light gray and stopped moving. That was it: the entire lake had frozen over with a thin layer of ice, right before our eyes. We didn't know that was even possible, as normally the freeze takes place at night when we're not watching.

So there we were, ready to begin our isolation, which we were well prepared for. For two days the ice thickened, and was about an inch and half thick when the weather turned warm again. Now, 7 days after the lake froze, we're watching as the waves break up the last of our initial ice cover, and we'll have to start all over again.

Although we're disappointed that ice-up will take longer this year, forcing us to miss a couple of events in early December that we had hoped to attend, we're also a relieved that we will probably be able to row to the world tomorrow. Once the lake begins to freeze, it takes about 10 days, on average, before the ice is solid enough to walk on. In the past five days we've already gone through a third of our milk provisions that were supposed to get us through to the end, not anticipating that the ice would melt and lengthen our isolation. We don't need much of anything except more milk and powdered milk. (Gary goes through a lot of milk since his radiation treatment.)  It will be nice to visit a friend or two, too, and have a reason to run a comb through our hermit hair and put on our going-to-town clothes.

Meanwhile, this past week we've been enjoying these quiet days that let us catch up with ourselves. Gary's been chopping and stacking firewood, and I've been getting back to painting. The gray days mean the solar energy isn't replenished often enough by the sun to support excessive internet and television, so it forces us to tune out and do something else. It's scary how productive we are without those distractions, and how interesting our pile of games and our bookshelves becomes.