Lake Erie: Still Frozen on March 24th!

This has been an incredible winter for Northeast Ohio, and Spring just doesn't seem to come. Yesterday, I took time out of a busy day to visit my old friend, Lake Erie. The Lake looked beautiful and awesome--but, alas, it was still pretty much frozen as far as the eye could see. That might change today with rain and warmer temperatures. It struck me this morning that the Cleveland Indians will begin their regular season in about a week--and winter still hanging around!

Here are some photos I took yesterday at Mentor Headlands:

Looking east toward the Fairport/Grand River Lighthouse

Looking west toward Mentor Lagoons and Willoughby

Looking north--all frozen!

Hundreds of people will be swimming here come this summer!

Still Ice on Lake Erie on April 2nd

Spring is beginning in Northeast Ohio, but there is still plenty of ice on the Big Lake, as you can see in the photos below I took today from Mentor Beach Park. Geez, boating season will start next month--but look at it now!

Looking east from Mentor Beach Park

Looking north

Looking northwest from Mentor Beach Park

A Fantasy Poem about Frozen Lake Erie

The Frozen Lake, from Mentor Beach Park

Canucks and Yanks Crossing Frozen Lake Erie (a fantasy)

As if it were December 31, 406 AD all over again--when

Vandals, Alans, and Suebi, barbarian hordes, my ancestors,

Swarmed across the frozen Rhine--

The Roman Empire on the way to falling.

January 28, 2014, coldest winter in decades,

Lake Erie frozen from Toledo to Niagara Falls,

Catawba Island to Put-in-Bay to Point Pelee,

Cleveland to Rondeau, Long Point to Presque Isle.

And what happens? The barbarous Canucks seize their chance,

And start walking south, many with dogsleds,

Some on 4-wheelers or skimobiles,

None with passports.

The Canucks want liberty, cheap consumer goods,

Affordable housing--they want respect and status as North Americans,

Real Americans. They want warmth and sunshine.

And swarming north are Yanks, equally barbarous,

Also without passports, some with snowmobiles, dogsleds, 4-wheelers,

Wanting good health insurance, humane cities, less poverty,

Less vitriol, more kindness, more, what? Something else . . .

The Canadian frontier, where if you wanted, you could amble

Through wilderness to the Arctic,

Walk to the land of the Inuit and polar bear--

To the North Pole, for God’s sake.

Where imagination has fewer limits--or so they think.

The arduous trek is 2 hard days minimum, more like 3 for most.

And after a day and a half of the hardest going imaginable,

Over frozen waves, domes and ridges of ice, across

This bitter cold desert,

The Canucks and the Yanks meet in the middle,

At the invisible line that nation states draw

Through mountains, prairies, and Great Lakes.

They set up tents on the ice, 2 feet of ice over 70 feet of water.

They trade slugs of smooth Canadian whiskey

For thermoses of hot coffee. They trade dreams, aspirations.

They find that they are not that much different, those hiking north

And those hiking south. They are equally barbarous

and equally noble humans,

all aching for something better.

Robert M. Coughlin/January 2014

[I've had some second thoughts about the initial draft of this poem. So I changed a few words (so the "barbarous" Canadians are not waking across the Lake for guns!). This takes some edginess off this poem, but makes it more reasonable, I think. The poem grew out of 2 short poems that I wrote many years ago about the frozen Lake Erie. One of those poems ended with the lines: "I could walk to Canada / If I had the imagination." Well, this poem takes that imagination a step further! I tried to pair up this story line of walking across the frozen lake with the historical fact of the Germanic ("barbarian") tribes crossing the frozen Rhine River around 406 AD, leading eventually to the fall of the Roman Empire. I use the term "barbarous" ironically, of course, to describe both the Canadians and the Yanks.]

"Mea Culpa," O Canada, for that first draft!

When Lake Erie Freezes

Lake Erie--Frozen Solid

the awesome sight--huge
pressure domes of ice
heaved into ridges
chaotic frozen waves
far as the eye can see

wondrous powerful lake

I could walk to Canada
if I had the imagination

I love Lake Erie in all seasons, in all its moods. This has been true from my earliest childhood in Willoughby-on-the-Lake, when my dad and my Uncle Jack would take us swimming down the street from our house. The above poem, written long ago, began with images of the Lake. But as poems sometimes do, it moved in an unexpected direction and became a poem about the power of imagination; it became a poem about creativity, about the writing of poetry.

Below: some photos from 2003, taken at Fairport Harbor, Ohio.

Me on the frozen lake. Fairport Harbor.

Carolan. Fairport Harbor, looking east.

A strange swirl of fish caught in the ice. Fairport Harbor.

Lake Erie in Winter--Mentor Headlands, Ohio

Looking west at sunset--January 4, 2014

Looking east toward Fairport Lighthouse.

The wild beach, looking toward Grand River entrance and Fairport Light.

Sunset.

Headlands dunes at sunset.

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 . . . .

Amazing Lake Erie Webcam

I accidentally ran across a website hosted by a neighbor of my cousin Bill Brock. Bill lives right on Lake Erie in the North Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland, a quarter mile from St. Jerome's Church. This is my Mom's old neighborhood! The lake has frozen up in the past few days, and the webcam clearly shows the wild wintry lake:
http://billhogsett.com/webcam.html