Frozen Lake Erie

This morning I drove by beautiful Lake Erie, one of the world's largest lakes (either 11th, 12th, or 13th largest in the world--there's a legitimate debate over this). Lake Erie cover 10,000 square miles, an astonishing size; and right now almost every inch of the big lake is frozen. It certainly looks like you could walk from Mentor, Ohio, to Erieau, Ontario, some 48 miles--if you were crazy, had warm boots and gloves, and maybe a flask of Jameson in your back pocket.

My brother Denny, Buster and Kenny Zylowski, and I tried this many years ago (around 1963). We only got about a mile off the beach at E. 260th in Euclid when a helicopter started hovering overhead. The pilot's hand gestures strongly suggested that we head back to shore--so we eventually did that, but not before trying to chop a hole in the ice with a hand hatchet and doing a little fishing (by the way, the ice was at least 2 feet thick; and we didn't get one bite). So we ambled back to the shore, where we saw two Euclid policemen waving their hands at us.

When we got back to shore one policeman told us, "Don't you guys know? There's a law against walking out on the ice." Now I'm 99.99% sure there was no law against ice walking or ice fishing. Now we did range in age from 11(Kenny Z.) to 14 (me and Buster Z.), and the policeman had a right to worry about our safety. He asked us, "Do your mothers know where you are?" I answered, "I think they know." We gave Mom somewhat misleading info on where we would be ("about a mile from the lake shore near E. 260th"--we didn't tell her it would be a mile out on the ice). I also told the policeman that if there was indeed such a law, it was not a just law. Because according to one of my teacher's at St. Joe's, a law is not just or valid if it has never been "promulgated." I imagine the policeman wanted to slap me right there when the word "promulgated" slipped out of my mouth. Heck, I would have slapped me! Anyway, we complied with their requests and headed back home, with our hatchet, our tackle box, and no fish for the effort.

I have loved Lake Erie all my life. I love it while out on my boat in the summer; swimming at Headlands or East Harbor; eating and drinking at Put-in-Bay--and even standing by the icy lake in February at Mentor Beach Park. Geez, if I had warmer boots and gloves and a drop of Jameson's . . . .