I wade back to shore and slide up the snowy ridge, on to a towel that stiffens with slick ice as I step dripping on to it. The water beads on my skin and disappears in the dry air. As I dress, bright whispers of sensation slip across my back and arms, like a thousand hands touching the surface of my body. This sensation is the reason why I hammered out into the lake. This brief but intense moment of physical pain, then pleasure, followed by total elation: the cold catalyses an endorphin rush.
Schlachtensee, Anne reminded me earlier, means ‘Battle Lake’. My German isn’t good enough to catch every nuance, and I’d missed that one. But back on the shore, dry and still shaking with cold, I think about my hammer, about the ice, and about the brief but uncontainable torment I’d sought in the water.
—
When I started winter swimming I became obsessed with the ice. With the colour of it – that clear white-blue – and the sensation of it as I ran my fingers across its surface, slick and numbing. For some time, ice had been on the minds of people around me: scholars in environmental research, scientists grappling with melting glaciers and rising sea levels. I’d grown up with it – the persistent freeze of Canadian winter – but the very materiality of ice had seemed far-off, an alien thing belonging to the North or to the Antarctic, not yet to me. I went to conferences on landscape and all anyone could talk about was ice. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey showed their maps, artists played video loops of melting ice. The cold was everywhere in our warming world.
Ice holds stories. To the German Romantics, Eisblumen – the patterns of frost that scale windowpanes on cold days – spoke to matters of both life and death. Likened to flowers by the German poet Karl Ludwig von Knebel, the ephemeral frost patterns were the subject of intense debate in aesthetic and scientific exchanges between Knebel and the poet Goethe. Did the Eisblumen’s intricate patterning derive from a relationship with organic life? The ice flowers – like stones and crystals bearing the orderly patterns found in nature – could be said to hold stories about the world, about life. But as is the case with ice, Eisblumen are temporary. As solid as we think ice to be, it disappears: phenomena like ice flowers are reminders of this.
The long distant past is brought into the present through melting ice. In the nineties, receding glaciers in the ice fields at the Alaskan-Canadian border revealed bear hides, hunting tools, relics of life from eight thousand years ago. Some years later, the frozen remains of a fifteenth-century hunter were uncovered in the territory of the Champagne-Aishihik First Nation. With him were found robes and tools scientists were keen to examine, more stories to be woven into the oral tradition of the local community. The glacier held all of this.
Entire worlds lie frozen beneath ice. In the past decade, scientists have been digging into Antarctic glaciers to reach new lakes: dark, unseen, subglacial worlds. These aren’t the glassy waters I find under January lake ice, but places of perpetual cold. They’re time capsules containing fragments of a lost past, a past before we irreparably changed our world. When a team of researchers drilled eight hundred metres through a glacier to reach the shallow water of Lake Whillans – one of hundreds of subglacial lakes on the southern pole – they found life in the water, life in the mud. Single-celled organisms that survive in the darkness, feeding off of carbon dioxide. The Antarctic lakes are a world without phototrophic life, a world without sunshine, but life is there. The ice holds the world in wait.
When I’m not swimming, I read about these lakes endlessly. I watch videos about them online, longing for their white-blue ice, as if the cold on the screen might reach me. I watch sterile-suited scientists drill into the lake, past clear, pristine water. What the drill brings up is the mud, not what I imagine. A pristine muck, clots of the earth, like the knot in my chest I have been trying to unwind by swimming. It isn’t untouched, but rather intimately touched – by time, by darkness, by the cold. It is intensely populated with life, held beneath the water and the ice sheet. The lakes around Berlin arrived here slowly, through glaciers, and it is as if the water’s yearly retreat into solidity is a bridge between these cold places.
—
The winter is holding fast on to the city. In town, the Spree is solid, a clouded white block expanding between the embankments. The muddy tracks of toboggans line the hillsides. For a short burst, everyone is outside, and then just as quickly it is night and the city is too cold to bear.
A day as bright as summer arrives, a cold but glowing sun sitting high in the sky, and we set out. Coco and I take the S-Bahn east, past the city’s edge and into Strausberg, thirty kilometres out, halfway to the Polish border. It’s an old fortress town with a crumbling wall cutting through its centre. Straussee, where I swam in the summer, sits to its west.
We’re not here for Straussee, but rather to walk the forest that stretches out beyond it, out towards Bötzsee. A thin layer of ice seals the path, so that I have to dig my heels into the ground with every step to avoid slipping. The sun leaves a thin layer of meltwater on the path. The snow clings to the ground stickily, noisily. Rounding Straussee, we come to the edge of the forest, white and green broken only by the burnt orange of the tree trunks. A single line of deer tracks extend into the woods; no other footsteps follow them, but we do.
In Fontane’s Rambles, he wrote about summer in this forest and the one north of it, now merged as the Strausberger und Blumenthaler Wald. Blumen is the word for ‘flower’, for ‘blossom’, and Fontane thought the forest was so rich with blossom that it seemed to proclaim its own identity at every turn. ‘I am the Blumenthal!’ he wrote. Now, in winter, it remains alive in the absence of blossom: glowing green in the undisturbed snow, patches of moss brimming on the branches. The farther in we trek, the warmer it feels, as if something of summer was contained here between the trees and above the snow.
Coco and I are debating our superpowers – I can’t decide whether I’d rather be able to withstand extreme cold or be good with a hatchet, as if they’re mutually exclusive – when we arrive at Bötzsee. It’s frozen solid, a blue-white seal of ice on the surface. It is thick, unmoving.
I’d been here last winter on my own, when the snow was just as sticky, and found the forest melting around me. The lake then had broken up into thick slabs of ice, like paving stones afloat in pools of shallow water. But today is entirely different: the cold hasn’t abated and the lake, shallow as it is, has frozen fast to its edges, like the water has turned to stone. It doesn’t move when I step out on to it, and as I test its thickness with the back of my hammer, I realise that swimming will be an impossibility. It’s at least three inches thick.
I persist, anyway, working with my hammer over a piece of ice an arm’s length away from me. It takes six blows with the back of the hammer to break a crack in the ice, an opening no wider than a coin. I keep going, creating a line of holes next to one another, until a small arc of open water appears. I’m perched on the edge of the frozen lake as I hammer, my heels resting on a tree root jutting out from shore, my toes on the ice. It isn’t secure, and I should know better.
Coco watches from shore as the ice begins to break up. I heave great chunks of it aside as the hole widens, holding the fragments up to the light. It is heavy, but held against the light I think it is the clearest thing I’ve ever seen, incongruously light and fluid for its weight. Fresh water produces this kind of clarity; it’s called ‘sweet-water ice’, from the German word Süßwasser, meaning fresh water. I throw the pieces aside and they clack and slide across the surface of the lake. Just as quickly, the ice beneath my feet gives way, and I fall sideways, clumsily, into the cold. My boots fill with water and slush, and I turn to see Coco laughing and then running towards me, her face torn between amusement and concern. I begin to laugh too.
She draws me out of the water, which is only waist-deep, and I lope sodden on to the shore. The hole in the ice is considerably larger now, I notice, before turning to my soaked clothes. I’ll need to lay them out to dry before we take the long hike
back through the snow. I strip off my leggings and lie them in the sun – I hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes and now realise my mistake – and tip my boots upside down to drain. I peel the socks off my feet and lay them side by side, curled and damp. I return to the ice with my hammer.
Stepping into the lake again, I plunge up to my waist. At the very least, a few more minutes with the hammer will give me enough space to move, though I’ll never get a proper swim. Hammering away, my arms grow warm with the work of it as my legs grow cold in the water. Soon, the opening is five feet across and I’m able to stretch out into it, to luxuriate in the sensation of pain that washes over my limbs. The hammer rests on the ice as I sink down low into the lake, letting the cold work its way up my shoulders and around my neck.
Coco takes a photograph. When I look at it later, all I’ll see is that damned hammer sitting next to me on the ice, a tiny crook of black steel atop the vastness of the frozen lake, this tiny thing I use to create a space for myself in the water. The lake around me is an unending white.
errare
Five months after first moving to Berlin, shortly after that trip to Rügen and the Baltic Sea with Jacob and Tom, I was scheduled to move back to London. Three years had passed since I’d left my husband and my life there. I’d spent most of that time in Toronto, at work on my doctorate. I’d grown stable, studious and stronger than I’d ever been. The flare-ups of my past had disappeared, and I no longer felt driven by fear. But I still longed for England.
The short time carrying out research in Berlin was always meant to be temporary, a grace period between the stages of the life I’d planned. I hadn’t intended to love Berlin, and I hadn’t intended to fall in love. I was a planner; the plan dictated what came next. My research position in Berlin had ended, and there was work to do on my doctorate. It was time to go back to England.
London was home: not simply because it had been home with my husband, but because it was something I chose and chose again. In all the years I’d been away, the magnetic grasp of the city hadn’t disappeared. None of the other places felt like that: it felt as though the other places were things that just happened to me. I was born in Canada, I was sent to Berlin, all of that accidental. But I wanted to be back in London – amidst the greying streets and the frowning commuters – and I wanted to be near to the Heath again.
My friend Amy had a room for me in Shepherd’s Bush, in the shadow of the Westfield Centre. It was on the top floor of a Victorian terrace with painted floorboards and a window overlooking the garden. It was quiet and mine. Arriving there, I felt relief, like I’d finished something I had set out to do. I’d found my way back to the city.
I climbed the stairs to my room and began to unpack. Unzipping my duffel, a card slipped out. It read: 1. Keep in touch. 2. Plan adventures with me. 3. Come back. I realised then that Jacob had tucked it into my bag before I’d left, this small but captivating piece of him and our Berlin. I had left, tried wholeheartedly to put my feelings aside, but the card held a gravitational pull.
I’d been single-minded about returning to London for so long; the absence of the city had become a part of me, an invisible ache that had abated once I’d returned. Now in its place I felt some small fragment of something else: a longing for some other place, for this other person. But I resolved to be where I was, to make London home again, and to trust that in doing so, the feeling would dissipate.
There was work to do: I needed to finish my dissertation fieldwork, a long list of interviews I’d arranged as part of my research. I had a list of archives to visit. And I needed part-time work. My scholarship was paid in Canadian dollars and would barely cover the rent in London. The lightness of returning came with the shadow of financial pressure, of work, and of responsibilities I’d let slide back in Berlin. I had hoped it would be simple.
The day after returning, I stepped forward into a crossing on Oxford Street and was struck. I felt only the weight of the thing, heavy but hollow metal, and then nothing. There was a hard crack as I hit the road. There was a gap, a moment empty of all sensation, and then I was on my feet again, searching for the pavement. A crowd of strangers took my arms and sat me back down, slowly shuffling me on to the side of the road. Someone retrieved my glasses – somehow intact – from the middle of the intersection, and then I could see again. My vision was narrow, just a fragment of the night directly in front of me. I saw rain and traffic lights, the legs of the passersby not stopping. My ears rang with the electro-fuzz of fear, of adrenaline. To my left, a taxi driver had pulled over and was calling an ambulance. A sensation of heavy weight pressed on my right shoulder – the opposite of the lightness I felt in the water.
There was a familiar voice: Amy was with me, and her voice emerged from the din of rush-hour traffic. She was speaking to a man – a street cleaner – as he began to wrap me in a bin bag, as if it would keep me warm or dry. He slipped a bin bag under me and wrapped one around my shoulders, like I’d just run a marathon and needed to be wrapped in foil. I don’t remember anyone’s faces; I remember their legs and the cold feeling of the wet road. My first clear thought was of Jacob, about the words on the card.
When you swim in the cold, the pain triggers an endorphin rush that hits you moments after leaving the water. Initially, there’s just shock. It can be incredibly dangerous – it can leave you gasping for breath. You risk swallowing water and drowning. But once the shock passes – and with it, the initial pain – there’s space for something else. I feel it on my body when I step out of the cold and into the air: the sudden tightening of the skin as the water evaporates, the rush of sensation working its way across my body. There’s the rush, the elation. It’s an inexplicable lightness.
That same rush hit me after the accident. As I lay strapped to a spinal board in an ambulance, I told jokes to the paramedics. I laughed at my bad luck, returning to London and being immediately knocked down by a taxi. They asked if I had looked the wrong way, and then they put an oxygen tube to my mouth, and laughed along with me. They leaned in and told me not to be afraid, that they were wheeling me through the trauma unit. I smiled and told them I’d be fine. I was dazed, exaltation running through my limbs. Pain still throbbed, distantly now, in my shoulder. I looked over and saw Amy, anxiously clutching my bag in the corner of the ambulance.
—
The winter comes imperfectly. The elation of the ice isn’t an unqualified pleasure: there are long days out, days when my phone grows so cold that it switches off and I find myself lost in the woods, still wondering why I haven’t bought a paper map. Soon into January, a painful itching in my feet arrives – chilblains – and I spend nights awake sliding my toes against one another, trying to relieve the burning sensation. My big toes turn perpetually red, swollen, near blistered. I rub them with a mixture of black pepper and sesame oil – a home remedy that brings momentary relief but leaves me smelling like Chinese food. None of the pain seems enough to stop me swimming.
It’s Friday. I’m wearing my parka, clumsily riding my bike with my woollen mittens on. It’s minus ten degrees Celsius. I’m wearing sunglasses too, because the sky is so clear and so bright, with an enormous cold sun shining at its edge. The trees cast shadows in the snow that are pale blue, the same colour as the sky. It’s promising.
Groß Glienicker See sits on the western edge of the city, nine kilometres from Spandau, at the very top of Sacrower See. They sit next to one another, one atop the other, like the dot and apostrophe that make up a semi-colon. I loved Sacrower See, so I have high hopes.
I cycle to the lake, slipping slowly along the peripheral residential lanes that are slick with ice. At the edge of the water, I stop. White snow dusts its surface. It’s frozen entirely and so beautifully bright I don’t want to touch it.
There’s a small beach ahead, and two young men tracing broad curves on the ice. Hockey – though I’ve never played it, never watched it, and genuinely don’t know the rules – makes me feel at ease. One of the small inherit
ances of being Canadian; it doesn’t mean much to me personally, but it’s a thing I’m meant to identify with, and at this point that’s enough. Rachel once tried to teach me the rules, sitting in front of the television in our rented flat-share. She quizzed me on teams, on the meaning of ‘power play’. Later, in England, I learned to call it ‘ice hockey’, but that has never felt right to me.
I stop with my bike and watch them skate, the alien, elastic sound caused by their blades bouncing across the open lake. As the skaters move across it, it stretches and cracks. A frozen lake is always alive. The vibrating, tugging sound seems to affirm this. Skates slide across the ice, and everything moves just a little, like a loosely strung guitar strum, but more remote, more inexplicable. It’s the sound of the ice cracking, but as sound travels it arrives in pieces from the nearest part of the ice first, and then the farthest, bouncing to the ear. In some places the sound is called ‘ice yowling’ or ‘ice banshee’, terms that capture its haunting, resonant twang. It haunts the lake in winter.
I walk out on to the ice and crouch down low, touching it with my bare fingertips. It’s like rough glass, flecked with frost, and beneath it I can see the water, like seeing through the back of a mirror. Sweet water. Beneath my feet, a cluster of water starwort presses itself against the ice, green against glass, a winter bloomer. I watch its frozen, suspended stillness – alive in the cold – and watch for the lake’s movement.
I can’t swim here today. Not because of the ice’s thickness – in some places it isn’t so thick, and I have my hammer. I crave the cold, and having cycled all the way here am so keenly awaiting it. But I haven’t made it here first. The hockey players are focused – they don’t even look up when I walk out on to the lake. I don’t think it is thick enough for skating, but I’m not going to make matters worse. Hammering into the ice, even at its edge, can compromise it much farther along the line. It splits and quakes itself in uncertain places, like cracks along a wall. And more than that, the silent sound of bright sun on snow, on the frozen lake, and that otherworldly sound of the skaters – I don’t want to disturb them. The sound they make is already the sound of the ice breaking.
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