Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [31]
As they worked their way north, Caroline explained that Mary’s grandfather had built the iceboat out of wood left over from when he had built the garage. “He built everything there, even some of the furniture. He dug out the cellar, built the chimney, the terraces, the dock and rowboats….” Mary’s father had told them about this; Caroline had met the grandfather only once, when she was very young.
“This last month I’ve been feeling like he’s still around the place, like a ghost, but in the best kind of way. The first night I got here the electricity wasn’t on and there was no sound at all. I never realized how used to noise we’ve gotten. That there’s always some kind of sound, even if it’s only the refrigerator.”
“Usually it’s a lot more than that,” Frank said, thinking of how D.C. sounded from his treehouse.
“Yes. But this time it was completely quiet. I began to hear myself breathing. I could even hear my heart beat. And then there was a loon on the lake. It was so beautiful. And I thought of Mary’s grandfather building everything, and it seemed like he was there. Not a voice, just part of the house somehow. It was comforting.”
“Good for him,” Frank said. He liked the sound of such a moment, also the fact that she had noticed it. It occurred to him again how little he knew her. She was watching the ice ahead of the boat, holding the boom line and the tiller in place, making small adjustments, splayed in the cockpit as if holding a kind of dance position with the wind. And there they were barreling across the frozen surface of the lake, the ice blazing in a low tarnished sun that was smeared out in long bars of translucid cloud—the wind frigid, and flying through him as if the gusts were stabs of feeling for her—for the way she was capable, the way she liked it out here. He had thought she would be like this, but they had spent so little time together he could not be sure. But now he was seeing it. His Caroline, real in the sunlight and the wind. A gust of wind was a surge of feeling.
She brought the iceboat around again, east to west, and continued the smooth curve west, as they were now shooting into the channel that began the other arm of the lake’s Y. Here the north wind was somewhat blocked by the peninsula separating the two arms of the lake, and the iceboat slid along with less speed and noise. Then another curve, and they were headed into the wind again, on the short arm of the Y, running up to a little island she called Rum Island, which turned out to be just a round bump of snow and trees in the middle of a narrow part of the lake.
As they were about to pass Rum Island, something beeped in Caroline’s jacket pocket. “Shit!” she said, and snatched out a small device, like a handheld GPS or a cell phone. She steered with a knee while she held it up to her face to see it in the sunlight. She cursed again. “Someone’s at camp.”
She swerved, keeping Rum Island between the boat and Mary’s place. As they approached the island she turned into the wind and let loose the sail, so that they skidded into a tiny cove and onto a gravel beach no bigger than the iceboat itself. They stepped over the side onto icy gravel, and tied the boat to a tree, then made their way to the island’s other side. The trees on the island hooted and creaked like the Sierras in a storm, a million pine needles whooshing their great chorale. It was strange to see the lake surface perfectly still and white under the slaps of such a hard blow.
Across that white expanse, the green house and its little white boathouse were the size of postage stamps. Caroline had binoculars in the boat, however, and through them the house’s lake side was quite distinct; and through its