It was in March, during the winter season for lake trout, and I had developed the habit on my way home from school of dropping down the boat-launch ramp in Portland onto the Big Rideau to run out to Trout Island for a half-hour's fishing as the sun set. We had long since given up hope of catching anything, but the stories out there were getting pretty good, and so the social part of the ice fishing was quite a success.
It had been quite warm the previous few days, and the lake had watered up, leaving about six inches of slush on the surface. This had frozen overnight, leaving a sandwich of slush between two layers of ice, I was to discover later.
I was earlier than the other fishermen this day, and bombed down the launch ramp in my Ford Courier pickup with my usual aplomb, not realizing until I was well out onto the lake that my back wheels were sinking, while the front wheels were on top.
This was not good. I speeded up, trying to get the back wheels up where the front wheels were. Still pretty mushy back there. About this time I realized that I was breaking through the top-ice into the slush below, and that if I stopped, I likely wouldn't sink, but I'd also be stuck. The truck would freeze in overnight, and then where would I be? So I kept on, now up to 5th gear and still accelerating.
A long pressure ridge loomed ahead. These ridges form occasionally on the Big Rideau. This one seemed quite steep, and about ten feet high. In urgent need of a banked turn to enable me to reverse my course without spinning out or downshifting, I headed for the pressure ridge, praying that there would be water, not thin air, on the inside of it.
I hit the ridge at 60 mph, ran up on it like a banked turn, and came off it at 70 on a reciprocal course for the boat-launch ramp. I looked in horror at what I had driven over. The pristine glare ice now looked like a piece of corrugated metal after a hurricane. What's more, the last 100 feet before the ramp was open water. The top ice I shattered on the way in must have been all that had survived the repeated salting from cars coming off the highway. I took aim and floored it.
It's hard to describe the sensation of falling through the ice in a hurtling vehicle. It's not that it's a sinking sensation, or that it's noisy. It's more an experience of total noise. Every sense overloads with this incredible tearing sound, sort of like having your grille shattered by a crystal pitcher -- thirty times per second. I don't remember anything else. Your mind seems to shut off.
Then, silence. A ticking sound of an exhaust manifold cooling. I open my eyes. The truck is sitting, stalled, ten feet up the boat-launch ramp. I get out and see if anything is left of my Ford. The thing is intact. Nothing has been bent or shattered. The truck is very clean, and the brakes and engine are very wet, but it is undamaged. I am astounded. I can't believe it. I have just bashed this thing through 100 feet of ice floes, my senses have overloaded to where I don't know which way is up, and the truck, which must have bounced along bottom on the way to the boat-launch ramp, is undamaged.
The point here is that there is no dignified way to go through the ice. As soon as that ice breaks, total disorientation occurs. Don't even think you can do anything at that point. You'll be totally confused. It was a few years after this caper before I again started driving on the ice.
That same year four guys in a military surplus ambulance jumped a pressure
ridge at the north end of the lake. There was open water on the other side,
apparently. The three in the front got out (I'm impressed). The guy in the
back had no interior latch. He's still in the back of the van, at 125 feet
in the Rocky Narrows. Sometimes I see the truck on my depth finder when
cruising through in summer.