the sound of ice-out

March 5, 2003

I stood on the Merrimack Essex Bridge in the rain and watched the ice break up and flow downriver. The rain and warm temperature is turning the snow cover into fog. Thick white fog enough to get lost in. Enough that I actually did get lost for awhile. Enough to make the river invisible from the roadside. If there were any waterfowl in the river between Haverhill and Amesbury I'd have to have had special fog-penetrating binoculars to find them.

Even at the bridge, the visibility is so limited that birds have to be right in front of my face for me to identify them. The landscape looks like a stylized Japanese print with carefully arranged rocks and conifers floating on a neutral background. It's difficult to tell the sky from the river without a landmark to orient myself. The ice floes look like clouds and the fog looks like ice. A lone great cormorant sits motionless on a rock at the tip of a little peninsula that sticks out to the side of Deer Island while chunks of ice break off the shore and slide into the water. The current whirls around in a powerful eddy there, trapping some of the ice floes and circulating them around and around before they either spin out of the eddy and float downriver or crash back into shore.

The amazing thing is the variety of ice sounds. Like all New England kids I know well the booming sound of ice expanding and cracking on skating ponds at the coldest part of winter. And I've heard icebergs calve in Antarctica. But the range of the soundtrack of this spring's ice-out surprised me.

There's a tinkling jingling sound when the ice breaks off the rocks on shore and slides into the water. It's almost like glass breaking followed by a whole lot of small splashes.

Then there's a roaring and a scraping when the big slabs of ice from further up river slide over the smaller chunks whirling in the eddy. The big ice floes grind down the smaller ones. The roaring is all out of proportion to the visual image. It's just ice. I can see through it to the smaller ice floe it passes over. Yet it sounds like a train rumbling past.

One really big ice slab makes a loud crashing sound when it hits the tip of that little outcropping on the island and breaks into two pieces. The larger piece floats off downriver. The smaller one stands on end against the rock where the cormorant was sitting. The cormorant has gone to roost on the I-95 bridge, which looks like it is suspended in the sky with clouds above and below it.

Today's Bird Sightings
Chain Bridge
great cormorant (10)
great blue heron (1)
common merganser (6)
Canada goose (1)
herring gull (10)
great black backed gull (1)
starling (1)

Today's Reading
Cat Culture: The Social World of a Cat Shelter by Janet Alger and Steven Alger, Eccentric Travelers by John Keay

This Year's Reading
2003 Book List