Everything cracks around me. The ice, even just a few feet along the bank, crackles like it is being stepped on. The trees tap each other’s branches in the light wind. I sit upon a rock by the Deerfield River. Thick mossy roots curl beneath me, open-air legs of the spruce tree. Its needles divide the sky from me, and protect it from the smoke of the fire the previous visitor set. The ashes, a split log, and a brick are what they left.
The cracking keeps convincing me I have company. To my right is a crook in the river; there the ice is thicker, so its cracking sounds like footfalls. In front of me, it is tinny, more like glass, or aluminum foil. The highway lies on the other side of the trees, which rise from the riverbank opposite. I cannot see it, but the wind of cars is a constant thrum. As is the waterfall a half-mile down the river: the Gardner Road Dam splits the waterflow, diverting half towards the Hydro Plant.
The ice keeps cracking. My body is getting cold, except my fingers.
I toss a few stones on the thin ice before me. They bounce once and remain there, barely cracking it. I walk to the thicker ice to my right. The same occurs. I return, lift the brick from its ash-home, and heave it onto the thin ice. It lands, makes a square dent, and slides off into the water. The dent does not puncture. A train calls in the distance, its rumble overpowering the falls and car-wind; I still hear the crackling. The river persists, heavy head barreling through time, insistent on its intent to wear things down. Given time, it would puncture the dam; given time, it would sink a hundred feet deeper into its ravine; given time, this ice would not just crackle but crack, into little pieces that, one by one, would sink and melt and become flowing water once again.
The ice cracks only under the surface: splintering into millions beneath what the land-shot gaze can perceive. The crook where the thicker ice grows and cracks is not a crook, I learn by looking closer, but the delta of a tributary, erosion in motion, a lithe and brief and little-known creek that hurries the mountainside down to the river.
—Will Sussbauer