On Thin Ice
Last night, I watched a 3-minute National Geographic video clip of a Swedish man skating alone on a thin layer of black, river ice winding through a wilderness. The visual is arresting. The video is captioned. I watched without sound, yet sound is what the video had to offer.
I believed I knew what it sounded like before I heard it. I invented my own ethereal soundtrack: a low haunting whistle, a hollow drone, a mellifluous fluting. Whatever the sound, it had to be beautifully spooky.
Inevitably, cracks emerged – I wondered, how safe? I was skeptical. I watched the graceful solo skater. Who’d do this without a team? A rescue team, on standby. Or, was this adventure analogous to a free-solo ascent on Yosemite, the terrifying reality of a fall, or in this case, an unwanted breakthrough, ever present?
On Christmas Eve, George Bailey was on his own suicide mission in It’s a Wonderful Life, standing on a bridge, before his Guardian Angel, Second-Class appeared. The Angel jumped off the bridge before George could, turning the suicide table, compelling George to save the Angel.
The Angel grants George the wish of having never been born. Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine your hometown, your family’s life in your hometown without you, as if you’d never been? It’s quite the lofty premise. That by abandoning your entire existence, your small sliver of the world is left worse off.
In my own version of It’s a Wonderful Painesville Life, I cannot envision altering my hometown’s name, it’s still Painesville. But Painesville’s recreation park has a Little League baseball field, named after a beloved local family, Calhoun Field, and I think maybe my LL participation played a part. Without my team’s perennial losing (in part, a credit to my noodle-arm pitching and hitting, and father’s Buttermaker-esque coaching style) to Calhoun’s team, contributing to the Calhoun success and notoriety, the field name could have gone to some other, more successful coach, someone greedier (Scrooge Field?) who skimmed from the park concession stand and operated as slumlords in the nearby lakeside harbor village, contributing to its declining real estate value and ultimate conversion to a uranium-processing facility for the nuclear power plant just east of this former Eden.
And what about my younger brother Ed’s Hall of Fame football career at Mount Union? Suppose it never came to be because Ed had no older brother to goad and challenge him, whose athletic prowess (a credit to my being older) Ed would eventually far surpass. Maybe Ed never aspires to play college football, and the entire Mount Union dynasty, through some strange cause-and-effect, dominos-falling-awry scheme, never win any of those numerous D-III Championships.
Maybe without me, little sister Rose, rather than raising a handsome, successful family with dog, never develops into a fully mature, self-determined adult. Instead, Rose falls prey to drug addiction from staying locked in her bedroom all of her tween years, stunting her mental and physical growth, never motivated to leave the house since no one was there (me) blasting Get the Knack and Live at Budokan on the turntable in my wall-sharing bedroom in our small home, driving her outside to commiserate with the neighbors and otherwise lead an active, healthy lifestyle.
Even wife Cheryl who, without me, marries unlucky, divorces, marries unlucky again, divorces again, then moves to Mexico, changes careers, leaving marketing for tequila distribution where she cuts all family ties, marries a drug lord and develops alcoholism.
In real life, the actress who played George Bailey’s little girl, Zuzu (in the movie, laying in bed she gave a wilting flower to her dad to paste back the dropped petals) had seven children of her own, one of whom committed suicide at age eighteen.
George Bailey loses hearing in one ear, saving his brother from an ice break on a pond, but the hearing loss is ultimately perceived as a blessing.
At the end of the movie, when George stands on the bridge, contemplating life’s hardships, he realizes that the life his Angel had erased, was reinstated when the policeman recognizes him and George tastes blood in his mouth. The final confirmation: George finds Zuzu’s petals have materialized in his pants’ pocket. The rose petals represent the emotional, spiritual, and financial support of George’s family and community in hard times.
I watched the video of the skater on thin black ice again, this time with the sound on: the eerie pinging, an enchanting echo.
The video captions suggest the importance of planning. The advice, like checking temperature and atmospheric conditions, is obvious. Other advice, like skating in groups sounds good, or bad. The ice flexes under the skater’s weight. My favorite advice, ‘Take satellite images before you go.’
The Swedish skater, a mathematician, explained the appeal of this complicated challenge, “If it doesn’t work, you learn from your mistake and try again.”