Words We Borrowed from the Ice

The first thing you learn on a frozen lake is that ice talks. It booms in the cold hours before dawn, a low, hollow note like a dropped piano, and it sings on still afternoons, a rising ping that seems to travel the whole length of the water. Old-timers on Lake Mille Lacs, in central Minnesota, will tell you the sounds mean the ice is alive and adjusting, shifting under its own weight. Newcomers hear them and freeze in place, certain the world is about to open beneath their boots.

Northern winters have given English a quiet vocabulary for all of this, a set of words that carry more weight than their dictionary definitions suggest. Some are ordinary words bent to a specific purpose. Some are local coinages that never traveled far. Almost none make complete sense until you have stood somewhere cold enough to need them. What follows is a field guide, gathered over one long January of conversations at bait shops, ice-fishing shacks, and kitchen tables from Duluth to Eau Claire, to a few of the words we borrowed from the ice.

Glare, Crust, and the Vocabulary of Surfaces

Start with glare ice, the bare, smooth, wind-polished kind that forms when a lake freezes before it snows. Anyone who has walked on it knows the word instantly: the flat, treacherous shine, the sensation of standing on a window. Its sibling is black ice, a term drivers use for the nearly invisible film on pavement, but which lake people use for something else entirely, the clear, dark, structurally sound ice that forms in a hard, early freeze. On a lake, black ice is good news. On a road, it is a warning. The same two words, opposite moods.

Then there is crust, the thin, brittle skin that forms on snow after a thaw and a refreeze. Dale Hovland, seventy-one, who has run a bait and tackle shop in Aitkin, Minnesota, since 1987, uses the word the way a baker uses it. "You can walk on the crust if you're light and quick," he told me, leaning on a counter cluttered with tip-ups and minnow buckets. "Or you can break through and go in up to your knee. Depends on the day. Depends on your luck." Crust is a small, cruel word, promising support and withdrawing it.

Snow has its own catalog, and the terms are more exact than outsiders expect. Graupel, the soft, pellet-like snow that looks like tiny styrofoam beads. Rime, the feathery white frost that builds on branches and wires in fog. Hoarfrost, its longer, spikier cousin, which grows on anything that stays still overnight. Ask a northerner the difference and you will get an answer, delivered with the calm authority of someone who has been correcting outsiders for decades.

You name what can hurt you, and you name what you're grateful for. Ice is both.

Words for Moving Ice

Lakes, unlike sidewalks, move, and the vocabulary follows. A pressure ridge is the raised seam where two ice sheets collide and buckle, sometimes rising several feet, sometimes marked by a crack wide enough to swallow a snowmobile ski. A heave describes the same event from a distance, a section of ice pushed up by expansion. Fishermen also speak of a pressure crack, a fracture accompanied by that sudden, gun-shot report that makes strangers jump and locals barely glance up.

The most evocative word may be shove, used on the Great Lakes for the moment when wind drives enormous plates of ice onshore, stacking them in tumbled piles along the beach like shattered glass. An ice shove can climb thirty feet and crush a dock, and residents of Lake Superior towns like Grand Marais speak of them the way coastal towns speak of storms, with respect, wariness, and a certain affection.

Ruth Lindahl, seventy-eight, who has lived on the Wisconsin shore of Superior since she was a bride, remembers a shove in the winter of 1979 that pushed ice up her driveway and stopped six feet from the kitchen door. "We couldn't open the garage for a week," she said. "The neighbors came with pry bars. It was the most exciting Tuesday of my life." She said the word shove with a small, satisfied emphasis, as if the language had been built for that single morning.

Thaw, Break-Up, and the Language of Waiting

Winter's vocabulary does not end with the cold. Some of its richest words belong to the turning of the season, the long, ambiguous stretch when ice is failing but has not yet failed. Rotten ice, in this usage, is not a moral judgment but a precise description: ice that has honeycombed and weakened in the spring sun, gray and candled, still thick enough to look safe, no longer thick enough to hold. Candle ice is the eerie, vertical crystalline structure that forms as ice decays, and when it collapses underfoot it makes a sound like a chandelier falling, a bright shattering hiss.

Then comes break-up, the moment the ice goes out. In northern towns it is not merely an event but a fixture of civic life. In Nenana, Alaska, residents have wagered on the exact minute of break-up on the Tanana River since 1917, and the pool now pays out a six-figure jackpot. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the informal version is ice-out, and the local paper of almost every lake town announces the date with a flourish. On Gull Lake, near Brainerd, the ice-out date has been recorded for over a century, and the fluctuation, earlier now by roughly two weeks than it was in the 1930s, is discussed at church suppers with the seriousness of a family illness.

Thaw itself carries a subtle emotional payload. To northerners it is less a temperature than a mood, tentative, suspicious, easily betrayed. A false thaw, in late January, arrives with dripping eaves and the smell of wet earth, and everyone knows better than to trust it. The word January thaw is spoken with a half-smile, the way you might mention a relative known for promising to visit.

Borrowed Words and Their Roots

A surprising number of these terms arrived from other languages, absorbed by settlers who found English inadequate. Anishinaabe speakers, who have lived on these lakes for centuries, developed a rich lexicon for ice and snow, distinguishing among stages of freezing and thawing with a precision English took generations to approximate. Scandinavian immigrants brought their own: the Norwegian word for the crust on the snow, skare, survived in family kitchens long after the rest of the language faded. Finnish settlers brought sisu, a term for stubborn, quiet endurance that Upper Midwest speakers have adopted with such enthusiasm that it now appears on bumper stickers.

Language scholars have long noticed that communities in extreme environments generate dense local vocabularies, a phenomenon sometimes exaggerated in popular lore, as in the persistent myth of a huge number of Arctic snow words, but real enough in its own right. What the Great Lakes region has is less a single dialect than a shared habit: the willingness to name fine differences because those differences matter. A fisherman who cannot tell four inches of black ice from four inches of white ice has a professional problem, and a trip to the hospital, in his future.

Ruth Lindahl put it more simply. "You name what can hurt you," she said, "and you name what you're grateful for. Ice is both."

A Small Glossary, and a Warning

For the reader who has never stood on a frozen lake, a short guide. Glare ice: bare, slick, dangerous underfoot. Black ice, on a lake: strong, clear, good. White ice, or snow ice: opaque, weaker, roughly half as strong as clear ice of the same thickness. Crust: the treacherous top layer. Heave, ridge, shove: the moving ice. Rotten ice, candle ice: the failing kind. Ice-out: the day the lake becomes water again, and the whole town exhales.

There is one more word worth knowing, and it belongs to no glossary. Northern people will tell you, if you stay long enough at their kitchen tables, that the ice is never entirely to be trusted, and that the trust you place in it is built slowly, in inches, over weeks of hard cold, and can be lost in an afternoon of sun. Dale Hovland, closing up his shop on a blue-cold evening in January, put it this way as he turned the sign to Closed: "Four inches is fine for walking. Six is fine for a snowmobile. But nobody ever measured how thick the fear is."

He locked the door. Outside, faintly, across the lake, the ice sang its long, rising note, and he stood a moment on the step, listening, the way you listen to an old friend you have never quite figured out.