Drowning Really Isn’t All Bad - Lake George, NY
My senior year of high school, during February break, my Dad and I decided to cross-country ski the thirty-mile length of popular Lake George, near my house in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY. A somewhat spontaneous trip, we arrived at the lake early in the morning, parked near the shore, and headed out.
Lake George is very popular for ice fisherman, and so as we began our ski trip, we asked a few near the shore how thick the ice was. They informed us that it was many feet thick, and we took notice of the trucks parked out on the ice as far as the eye could see.
It was cold and windy, about ten degrees, and after skiing for about twenty minutes, we approached a large “mountain range” of ice, that appeared to stretch across the ice. We later found out that when the ice freezes, it expands and pushes up, forming large piles of ice several feet high that stretch across the width of the entire lake, about a half mile.
My Dad approached this ice crack of ice chunks and noticed that there was water on top of the ice. Unsure what to do, we skied along the length of the crack until we reached the tracks of a snowmobile that had crossed the crack at that spot. My Dad turned to me for my opinion, and we both agreed that if a snowmobile could do it, surely a skier could, right?
So my Dad began to ski in the snowmobiler’s tracks, as I followed close behind, and suddenly I looked up and saw my Dad fall through the ice and go under.
I didn’t even know what to do. My initial, completely subconscious reaction was to start shrieking (I am a girl). So I did–shriek, gasp, shriek, gasp…. My Dad’s head popped up. His face was covered in blood from the sharp edges of the ice, and wherever he reached the ice kept breaking away. I couldn’t move, not knowing what to do. I began to form my ear-splitting shrieks into the word “help!”
An ice-fisherman near the shore heard me. Unable to see my dad, he began to saunter in our direction. As I kept screaming, he began to jog a little more quickly. By the time he had reached us, my Dad had somehow managed to get a ski-pole up on top of the ice. The fisherman crouched down, inching towards the water, and grabbed the ski pole, pulling my dad out onto the ice, all the way out of the water.
I somehow managed to gain control of my spastic diaphragm and was able to echo my dad’s simple “thank you” as the fisherman turned to go. My Dad, soaking wet, was later treated for hypothermia. After getting situated, we skied back across the lake in our tracks the our car.
When we got to the parking lot, there were a bunch of emergency vehicles heading out on the ice. Apparently one of the fisherman heard me screaming (probably the best thing I could have done, in retrospect) and had called 911 on his cellphone. My Dad was taken into an ambulance where he was taken care of and I was interrogated by well-meaning policeman. The EMTs were volunteers and my mother later made a sizable contribution to their fund.
After my Dad was treated, he put on my spare sweats (just a little too tight/short on him, but I’d brought them just in case), and then we went to a nearby laundromat and dried his wet ones. Thankfully we’d also packed our snowshoes, so we then drove to a nearby mountain and did some snowshoeing. Both of us swore we would never again go out on a frozen lake.
When we arrived home late that night, my mother took one look at my dad and asked what the hell happened to him. She wasn’t happy. But we were grateful to be alive, dry, and warm, and had enjoyed the snowshoeing at least!
One last note–if you ask my Dad his version of this story, he’ll tell you as he was struggling in the freezing water, trying not to drown, he could feel all these cool ice formations on the underside surface of the ice with his gloves. At least until his hands went numb.
Add comment April 4th, 2006