They were good-looking kids with just a hint of mischief in their eyes. Not troublemakers, no sir, but not meek little rule-followers, either. Evan Wilson and Jackie Fricke liked to have fun. They liked adventure.
And they liked the ice.
But then again, everybody around here likes the ice. Everybody in the communities edging the 132-mile shoreline of Lake Minnetonka, just west of Minneapolis, seems drawn to the vast frozen slab. The iced-over lake is a playground, a hangout, a thoroughfare, a shortcut, a second home. A way of life.
“You grow up with it,” says John Powers, who was raised here and now sells real estate in the area. “I have an 8-year-old, and he really wants to go out on the ice. For him, it’s as natural as breathing. I can see it in his eyes.”
There was no reason, then, why Wilson and Fricke, 16 and 17, shouldn’t have headed for Lake Minnetonka on the night of Tuesday, Jan. 21, in Wilson’s red 1992 Acura Legend. No reason why they shouldn’t have driven a few miles from their neighborhood to the shore and then right out onto the lake, which is really a system of some 31 interlocking waterways that can freeze all the way across.
People did it all the time. Always have. Still do.
In Northern states with prolonged low temperatures and lots of lakes and ponds, going out on the ice is commonplace. “They build whole cities out there,” says Jim Rice, who owns a coffeehouse in Deephaven, a small town along Lake Minnetonka, marveling at the fishermen whose huts freckle the ice all winter. Around the communities of fish houses are ice skaters, ice golfers, sledders, snowmobilers and the many people who race cars across the slippery glaze.
Going out on the frozen lake is routine. It’s no big deal.
But even if the excursion seemed ordinary to Wilson and Fricke and to everybody they knew, it wasn’t. Not, that is, in the winter of 2003.
“No one has ever seen a year like the one we’ve had,” says Lt. Brian Johnson of the water patrol unit of the Hennepin County sheriff’s office, which oversees the 22.2 square miles of Lake Minnetonka. “Even the old-timers haven’t seen this.”
A paucity of snow, unseasonably warm weather and other factors about which scientists still are arguing have combined to make the icy lakes fickle and perilous. Although this is not the deadliest season ever on Minnesota’s lakes (22 perished in the winter of 1982-83), there has been a remarkable number of near misses this winter and 10 people have died after falling through the ice — fishermen, snowmobilers, drivers.
Two of them were Wilson and Fricke.
The car was some 300 yards from shore on the lake’s eastern side when it went under. Friends say the two were heading for Big Island Regional Park, a campground in the middle of the lake. The area in which the car sank — where the water is 12 to 30 feet deep — typically is safe for driving in winter, Johnson reports.
Experts recommend that ice be 8 to 12 inches thick before a car is driven on it — for a truck or van, the thickness should be 12 to 15 inches — and in January on Lake Minnetonka, that’s usually no problem, he adds. Ice fishermen routinely plow roads on the ice, leading to what are called “fish houses.” Tire tracks are clearly visible from shore. For him and others who live and work around the lake, Johnson says, driving on the ice “is just like driving down the road.”
But the ice must have been thinner that night, thinner than anybody knew, plunging the startled teenagers into the frigid lake. Fricke made it out of the water, but died of hypothermia a hundred yards from shore. She was found the next morning by a contractor who spotted her from the site of a house he was building near the water’s edge.
Wilson, who drowned, was pulled from the lake later that afternoon.
Amid the grief and incredulity that accompany sudden death, especially the deaths of people so young, slowly grows another emotion: a kind of hushed awe. A mystery about why ice-topped water draws us inexorably toward it — in reality if we live close to it, in our dreams if we don’t.
`Sense of power
Frozen lakes, Powers says, are “exciting and enticing.” They are more than just wide patches of ice. “There’s a sense of power in being able to walk where two months earlier, you wouldn’t dream of it. I walked across a lake once and stood in the center of it, just looking around,” he recalls. “It’s there — and then it disappears,” when the warmer temperatures of approaching spring transform the lake yet again. But while they can, he and his son, Ori, go sledding on the ice, he says.
Bud Larsen, an outdoors columnist who lives in Moyie Springs, Idaho, some 30 miles from the Canadian border, says, “It’s the sense of the unknown, the thrill of taking a risk. And it’s the sheer beauty of a field of ice.”
Indeed, there is something solemn and hypnotic about a frozen lake. People can just sit and look at it for hours. It’s a magnet for contemplation. “You conjure up all kinds of visions,” Larsen says. “You think, `What’s going on in there?’ It’s awesome.”
A frozen lake is more than a meteorological phenomenon. It’s a crucial element in our internal visual landscape, a relic of a kind of lost wildness in our lives. When Franz Kafka defined literature as “the ax for the frozen sea within us,” he didn’t choose the metaphor lightly; a frozen body of water is an instantly recognizable symbol of mysterious depths, of the hinted-at and longed-for but ultimately unknowable.
Can’t last forever
There is an enchantment that clings to frozen lakes, a sense of suspended time. A frozen lake is like a held breath: It can’t last forever — it doesn’t even last very long, relative to the rest of the year — but before it is released, it seems filled with possibility.
One of those possibilities, of course, is disaster. For all of its polished, pristine beauty, a frozen lake can be a deathtrap — more so this year than any other time in recent memory.
Frozen lakes in several states have been behaving strangely, and nobody really knows why. A mysterious hole in the ice in North Long Lake near Brainerd, Minn., made national news, including a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal. By early January, five Wisconsin residents — two on snowmobiles, two in a truck and one ice-skating — had fallen through ice-covered water and drowned in separate accidents. And in southern Maine, four snowmobilers went through the ice of a frozen lake in January; two drowned.
Fluctuating temperatures that weaken ice were cited, as well, for the relocation of this year’s Iditarod sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. The competition shifted 360 miles north so that the dogs wouldn’t fall through thin ice.
Theories abound
Some scientists believe heavy rains have left a backlog of warm groundwater that’s been seeping into normally frigid lake waters, impeding ice formation. Name your theory and some expert has espoused it, says Johnson, who adds, “I don’t think you’ll find anybody who can explain the big open water areas. Bottom line is, we’ve had a series of mild winters and little snow cover. Not a good year for ice.”
As a rule, Johnson says, he never tells anyone that it is absolutely safe to walk or drive on the ice. But it isn’t illegal, and even in the wake of the spate of ice-related tragedies, authorities haven’t forbidden ice travel or posted signs. It’s as popular as ever. “For every person you ask,” Johnson reports, “you’ll get a different reason why. Some like the serenity and beauty. Some are fanatical ice fishermen. The kids just like to slide around on it.”
Perhaps it’s that very juxtaposition — serenity rubbing up against potential peril — that makes frozen lakes especially alluring. The forbidden and the familiar. The calm and the catastrophic.
Duane Rioux, a writer and ice fisherman in Waterville, Maine, believes the accessibility of frozen lakes is what makes them special. “Most people can’t afford to go fishing during the summertime because they can’t afford to buy a boat. Ice fishing lets you take the whole family out for the day. Snowmobilers love the ice because it’s flat, it’s wide open — and you can go a long way.”
A frozen lake is a “living thing,” Larsen says, and like all living things, it communicates with those who know how to listen to it. The sounds emitted by a frozen lake are weirdly memorable. Ice cracks, yes, but it does more than that too. It sends forth a deep, plangent note, like a muffled sonic boom.
“The first time I heard it,” says Larsen, who writes an outdoors column for www.ruralnorthwest.com, “I was ice fishing. I looked up at the sky and asked my buddy if a storm was coming. The ice is shifting and adjusting — it sounds just like an earthquake.”
Experienced outdoorsmen such as Larsen have rules for traversing the ice: They make sure the surface is level (“Low spots means cracks with water seeping up through compacted snow,” he says) and clear (“Cloudy ice means compacted snow, and it has only half the weight-bearing ability of solid ice”).
Adds excitement
But as any expert will tell you, no ice is totally safe — a fact that provides those who frequent frozen lakes a chilly little frisson of excitement.
Mark Wilson needs no reminders about the enthrallment of frozen lakes. He grew up in North Dakota, moved to Minneapolis to attend dental school in 1974 and stayed here to raise his children: Brian, 26; Alex, 18; and Ian, 13.
And Evan, who was 16.
“You don’t know how you should feel,” Wilson says. “There’s no way to prepare for this.”
On his right wrist, Wilson wears a silver charm bracelet that was taken from his son’s body, a present from Jackie Fricke. Each charm had a special meaning: chef’s hat (Evan wanted to be a professional chef); palm tree (Evan and his father had spent the Christmas holidays in Florida); lizard (Evan had a pet lizard).
“I spent a lot of time with him,” says Wilson, a periodontist. “He was a fun-loving kid.”
And, Wilson believes, a brave one: He is sure that his son helped Fricke try to survive. “They probably had time in the water to decide what to do. They planned their escape,” he says, with quiet matter-of-factness. “They struggled. They did everything they could.”
He hasn’t been to the lake since his son and Fricke died, says Wilson. “I don’t want to go there.”
Others, though, go quite a bit. The spot where Fricke’s body was found is marked by a makeshift shrine, with flowers and messages.
He didn’t know Evan was going to the lake that night, Wilson says, but it wouldn’t have mattered, even if he had. It wasn’t the sort of activity parents think of warning their kids about. Everybody does it.
Knowing the lake
Audra Dittmer, 19, agrees. She didn’t know Evan and Jackie, but she knows plenty of kids who ice fish and drive on the ice throughout the winter. She’s done it herself. She’d do it again.
“If you know the lake, you know which parts are safe,” she says. “But the weather’s been up and down for the past few years.”
Mia Rice, 24, who works in her father’s coffeehouse near Lake Minnetonka, says that when you grow up here, you don’t think twice about sledding, fishing, walking or driving on the ice. Yet she has four friends who have gone through the ice this year while aboard snowmobiles. They weren’t injured, but they got the scare of their lives, she says.
Nobody seems to stay scared long, however. The frozen lake’s pull is too powerful, its spell too strong — and always has been, says David Nitz, 61, who lives in Wayzata, another small town along Lake Minnetonka. The semi-retired building contractor recalls that on the same day Wilson and Fricke died — 42 years earlier — he, too, almost perished on the ice.
“It’s a coincidence, but what a strange coincidence,” says Nitz. He and a girlfriend were driving on the lake at night in 1961. “All of the sudden, the front of the car started going down. I looked at her and said, `Uh-oh.’
“I got out and was in the water paddling. The car was pointing down at a 45 degree angle — the engine is heavy, and the trunk floats because it’s got air in it — and I reached back in and pulled her out.” The car’s head and taillights stayed on, Nitz recalls, and their illumination of the icy water was eerily disconcerting.
Somehow — he’s not sure how — they hoisted themselves out of the lake and rolled to more solid ice. “You don’t feel the cold water. You don’t feel a thing. It’s all instinct.”
Instinct to explore
And another instinct, perhaps equally strong, is the one that sends us out to explore a frozen lake in the first place, Nitz says. He’s driven on the lake repeatedly since his ordeal.
A frozen lake is gorgeous one moment, deadly the next. The ice can be mesmerizing but dangerous, a blankness upon which we project our anxieties and fantasies, a nifty site for winter sports. And a graveyard.
Ice is — and then isn’t.
The ice looks as if it will last forever, but never does.
The ice, then, is like a memory — perhaps like a memory of a 16-year-old’s smile. Memories seem permanent, but in the fullness of time, in the endless turnover of seasons and climates and eras, all things change, and the ice that seemed massive and menacing and inviolable yesterday is, today, a harmless-looking pocket of water, a shifting liquid ghost of the solid body that was.
Seductive and dangerous
The stories people tell about their experiences on frozen lakes range from the spiritual to the terrifying.
– “There’s a sense of power in being able to walk where two months earlier you wouldn’t dream of it.” — John Powers, local real estate agent
– “All of a sudden, the front of the car started going down. I looked at her and said, ‘Uh-oh.’ “I got out and was in the water paddling. The car was pointing down at a 45-degree angle — the engine is heavy, and the trunk floats because it’s got air in it — and I reached back in and pulled her out.”
The car’s head and taillights stayed on, Nitz recalls, and their illumination of the icy water was eerily disconcerting.
Somehow — he’s not sure how — they hoisted themselves out of the lake and rolled to more solid ice.
“You don’t feel the cold water. You don’t feel a thing. It’s all instinct.”
— David Nitz, building contractor, who recalls a night in January 1961 when he went driving on the frozen lake with his girlfriend.
Finding words for the inexplicable
Fiction and non-fiction writers have tried their hand at explaining our fascination with frozen bodies of water — and the disasters that can happen there:
We stopped, looked at one another, and then bang — right under our own feet. More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that ice was moving and splitting like glass. The cracks went off all round us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards. . . . The deep booming of ice continued. . . .
Aspley Cherry-Garrard, “The Worst Journey in the World” (1922)
Ice. I am fascinated by ice, held by the images of woolly mammoths and ancient man, fleeing south or making, like the Inuit today, some terrible, harsh accommodation to lands grown white and desperately cold.
— Thomas Levenson, “Ice Time: Climate, Science and Life on Earth” (1989)
Her blood was racing, and she was no longer conscious of the cold. She forgot to look where she put her feet; they took care of themselves. . . . When she reached the river bank she sat down just long enough to take off her walking-shoes, and put on the other pair with skates attached. . . . Without looking or thinking she struck toward the centre for smoother ice. A soft, splitting sound brought her to herself in a flash, and she saw dark lines running in the ice about her. She turned sharply, but the cracks ran ahead of her. A sheet of ice broke loose and tipped, and she plunged to her waist in cold water. . . . The ice cake slipped from under her arms and let her down.
— Willa Cather, “Lucy Gayheart” (1935)
