ICE IN PARADISE?
Rex Burress
News reports show that Paradise, California, opened their outdoor ice rink on November 16, 2015!
Ice in Paradise? Winter-ice in Paradise is almost as rare as ice in Oroville, 15 miles to the south, where it rarely freezes beyond a short skim! But for $12 in Paradise, you can slide around on an outdoor artificial pond and make believe you are back east where ponds and streams are usually frozen all winter...without an electrical refrigerated ice skate rink!
Ice has its beauty and recreational joys...for awhile...before winter hardships dominate, like in Missouri, where natural ice gets thicker and thicker and initial delight becomes perpetual disgust. I experienced Midwest winters for 21 years before I chose California. To escape frigid climes, I left behind tracking animals in the snow, fishing through the ice, skating up and down the cut-off creeks, watching aquatic life under clear ice, admiring snowy sculptures drifted by the wind and frost on snowberries--and, frosty feet, fingers, face, and chilled body!
Around the town of Trenton, Missouri where I lived as a boy, ponds and lakes nearly always froze over in winter to easily support your weight. Water birds had no choice but to fly south to open water, and frogs adapted to a winter life trapped under the ice. It was like magic when big bullfrogs disappeared in the fall and reappeared in the spring! “Frogs have to breathe, don't they?” That was what I thought at the time, and I would even see frogs in their underwater tadpole stage wiggle to the surface for a good gulp of air. It was claustrophobic to think of them being covered by ice like a body in a grave. Turtles were equally adaptable. But then they had the resurrection in the springtime.
The coming of ice and snow signaled a time to prowl icy waterways, stalk the cottontails along brushy fence rows, enjoy nature's artistry, and scout for muskrat runs under the ice. The hunting game was to chop through and stake a trap to catch the valuable, beaver-like,ever-active furbearer.
The trapping passion continued from the No Creek farm on to Trenton town and Muddy Creek where the stranded old channel ran along a bluff near our house. I teamed with a neighbor high school pal, Gordon Kasperson, to catch muskrats there, too.
The 'Old Ditch' original channel of Muddy Creek was also a local skating site where groups gathered, built a big bonfire next to cozy log seats, roasted marshmellows, and skated along the two-mile creek, although my blades were the clamp-on type attached to shoes and not very efficient. That kind of skating rink is very atmospheric, laid out along trees and shrubs where rabbit and fox frolicked and winter birds clung to their thickets.
Southwest of Trenton, just over the bluff, was a big Grand River cut-off where folks skated. Schoolmate Jerry Berlin said he once skated all over town when a freezing rain plastered the streets! Ice, and snow, offer their play-land for kids as well as a peril-land for the less cautious.
Winter adaptation, dormancy, hibernation, and migration have special effects on animals. They have to completely adjust their living habits in order to survive. While many bird species migrate, especially insect eaters, some like the seed-eating juncos, sparrows, cardinals, and opportunistic crows and jays, are residents. Some bat species hibernate while others migrate.
At one time before education enlightened mankind about migration, it was believed that swallows hibernated in the mud when they disappeared in the fall! “We've come a long way, baby!”
“It is not the strong that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable.”
--Charles Darwin
“Some say the world will end in fire./Some say in ice./From what I've tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire./But if it had to perish twice,/I think I know enough of hate/To say that for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice.” --Robert Frost