Oh I Wish I Had a River

           

          

John O'Brien Inman

                              

"Tonight, they took the road that wound around away from the house, through a copse, and then out into the clearing to where there was a dip. And in the dip, surrounded by sloping grassy banks, lay the Lake.

 

As they drew near to it, looking ahead, Fanny saw lights flickering, yellow and white and green and red and blue, like a rainbow in the darkness, and then the Lake lay before them, frozen, glittering, unearthly under the rising moon. And set all around it on poles in the grass were Chinese lanterns, and in other places, fires, logs set within iron hurdles, and blazing bright, and right on the edge of the ice were two great braziers, glowing like the smithy's forge, and sending showers of white sparks flying up into the night sky.

 

Already people were skating, in pairs and singly..." 

 

 Susan Hill, "Lanterns Across the Snow"

           

 

Barbara Whipple

      

"Soon the upland lake was safe for skating. We tried it cautiously. The ice groaned and cracks raced across it; but it held. It was ours alone. We were attended only by magpies, brilliantly black and white, that flopped in thorn trees, and by wagtails that walked delicately on the cold glass. Pushing out from the entombed reeds to the dark centre of the lake, we skated for hours and days.Even more than in summer the upland was the crown of the world. With no bellying clouds above, no waist-depth of corn, no larks measuring the air, it was an emptiness that barely knew gravity. Striking out we might have skated over the village spire; we might have fallen off the Ile de France.

 

Our grinding skates scored the lake in wide parabolas that met and parted, yet always returned to the fixed point of ourselves. I would unravel the white lines on the ice, the weals with raised edges, and trace our meeting tracks. Sometimes we skated hand in hand, swinging together; close to each other and to the landscape as in the cocoon of summer. As I look back, the plumes of breath that we trail carry texts, ribbons with words as in comic papers. But they carry, as my head carried, tags of verse. As I sweep across the lake I am followed by 'Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber', and the fluttering ribbons speak of Dido's 'silver arms' and 'The pastures of the firie steeds that draw the golden Sunne'.

 

Night obscures the texts that must have followed us, the symposium that must have streamed from our lips on the evening of the fancy-dress party...Michele and I, a shepherdess and a pirate, arrived soon after dark...While Luca and Ada, our Italian servants, built a bristling fire on the bank and hung soup above it in a huge cauldron, we skated down the lake with armfuls of chinese lanterns and hung them from thorn trees and willows. Each time Michele struck a match, bare branches and the oval of her face appeared beside me. The night, like all that frozen fortnight, was windless and the candles burnt without a flicker.

 

...When the lanterns were set, we raced up the lake, and on each side of us, as though newly risen, hung chinese moons, red, white, ochre, and amethyst. There was no sound but the thin scraping of our skates. 

   

Charles Wysocki

...Alone, we opened the first bottle of champagne and glass in hand hobbled on our skates up to the blazing fire. We heard voices floating across the iron fields long before our friends materialized suddenly in the orbit of the firelight; nodding ostrich plumes where Dedette came with a Capuchin that was Antoine; Clotilde alone, throwing a long shadow as Mephistopheles...Clumsy as auks while they stumbled down the bank, on the ice they were released. They glided off, not the fallible friends I knew, but personifications of their costumes - Beauty and Renunciation, Sin, Valour and Jest. The ice carried essences, not people.

 

Something unconscious as migration drew them down the lake between the lanterns. They were carried as on a breeze. Their common impulse spent, they scattered, mostly two by two, and no orrery could have determined their swoops and circuits. The lake hummed like a tuning fork. Some drained their glasses, some escaping the lantern light drifted in embrace under the private willows, some hissed like meteors down the ice, and some, the expert skaters, watched the long smooth scars they left behind them. Converging and effortlessly parting, they were near and in a moment far away...the skaters now are middle-aged; yet for a moment they seemed timeless, as permanent as the valley and the upland. My vision, as though sharpened by the diffused light and the still air, set those friends on the lake forever..."

 

Robin Feddon, "Chantemesle"

   

Rob Gonsalves

Skating on a moonlit lake sounds out of this world. It's my dream to one day throw a skating party like these described.

(Find me another literary moonlit skating description to add to my collection - is two considered a collection? - and I'll invite you to my party if I ever pull it off.)

 And tell Joni she's invited too.         

 Joni Mitchell