I stood on the riverbank of the Mississippi River in the afternoon and watched eleven bald eagles rafting on ice floes. A lone Northern pelican swooped low above open water patches. It was January, sixty-one degrees. The sun was blinding. I wore a black tee shirt, jeans shorts. Most walkers on the Great River Road path were dressed in summer apparel. A storm was coming, so said Channel 4 News, but there was no sign of it. The unfreezing river seemed surreal.
Dusk, the sky darkening early. I hiked up the bluff road toward my house. The sunset had been gorgeous, the blazing orb of the sun sinking in river ice, light shards spearing the woods. At eight o’clock the spring-like air was still upon us. I dared long for dogwoods and redbud trees and red-wing blackbirds of March.
At eight-twelve a great roar came from outside. I stepped out on the front porch. An unseen force howled; I thought a tornado was coming. The screech owl which nested under the porch eave was hunkered down. An empty plastic cat litter pan on the sidewalk helicoptered up as if by an invisible hand, rotated, and floated a few feet before crashing on the ground. I went inside and slammed the door. Boreas had arrived, a fifty mile an hour wind bending the trees double and hurling detritus against the house.
By daylight, it was zero. The cold was a punch to the solar plexus. I lay shaking in bed under a blanket and comforter with Scout the cat. Not because I was cold. I was remembering the bitter cold winter night in February 1985, when I drowned.
Sixteen people, friends, and guests, meet at the ranger station at five pm on the east side of the Illinois River, twenty-three miles north of Peoria, for a walk across the ice. It is twelve below zero. I’m dressed in so many layers I can barely move my extremities. We carry coils of rope for emergencies (there has never been one in a decade of the ritual), backpacks with thermoses of coffee, hot chocolate, and flashlights.
We set off in eight pairs, one after the other in a line. The full moon lights the way. The ice cracks and groans and undulates slightly. It is like walking on a frozen waterbed. Winter had been moderate until the past two weeks of extreme cold, the ice forming and thickening quickly.
I’m sweating by the time we reach the second of two islands. Barred and great horned owls call out territories. Ice bubbles and rime ice cover the ground. We smash them with our boots, the sound like the cracks of gunshots, as we walk north to south on the narrow island. We sip our drinks and marvel at the night. At nine, we head back toward the ranger station.
Not a hundred yards from the island, there is a great cracking of ice, like a lightning strike, and Leo, a short, older man, falls through the ice and disappears. Hikers scream. My friend Jim falls through next. The river is five feet deep; Jim is six foot three. He lands on the river bottom, bounces up, grabs a rope, and is pulled out in short order.
Then I see the fissure of ice race at me, splitting ever wider, and I plunge into the icy, dark river, landing on the bottom, boots first, my left foot trapped in the funnel cone of a bull spring, an underground freshwater seep in the riverbed. Several deaths a year are caused by area bull springs in rivers, the victims sinking underwater, unable to free themselves. My head is just above water.
Oddly, the river is warmer than the air. The fight or flight instinct takes over and most of the hikers, Jim included, run back to the island. Three men work at rescuing Leo and me, lying prone on the ice and tossing ropes. There is an explosion ahead of me; Leo is fisting his way through the ice and gasping for breath. He is roped and pulled out, and he runs to the island, and friends escort him the quarter mile to the shore and the warming shed. I am roped, but the bull spring holds fast. It takes half an hour, the men cautiously tugging me free. The pulling fractures my lower left leg. I feel nothing.
Within minutes, lying on the ice, my body freezes stiff. Ice encrusts my beard, and my open eyes and lips freeze solid. The only reference I have is sound. I can see the Lake of Sleep on the moon’s surface, and Samuel Beckett acolyte I am, I imagine I laugh. Then blackness. Then yelling. Then oblivion.
Until Charlene Jones Baldwin, my mother, appears, dressed in a summer frock, and bathed in searing light. She leads a wolf on a golden chain across the open water, and they settle next to me, Mother all pale skin and freckles, smiling and petting me, the wolf lying across my torso. When she was a child, her infant brother, Buddy, drowned in a bathtub. In 1972, Charlene was drowned by a boyfriend at Bull Shoals Lake in the Ozarks. Yet here she is, attending a third Jones drowning. The wolf licks my numb face.
I was a dead agnostic—which means I am alive to think such a fear. Until. I slowly become aware of a distant voice, as from the faraway shore. The voice gets louder and louder until it seems directly in my ear. Martin, a guy visiting from Hamburg, shouts at me in a heavy German accent: “Chene! Chene! Euchene! You vill not die! You vill not die!” He repeats the mantra all the while pounding my chest, other rescuers trying to stop him.
I begin to moan. Mother smiles. She and the soulful wolf vanish in a spasm of light. I think I am paralyzed.
The rescuers shed their coats and pile them on me.
I rejoin the land of the living, and strangely, I am angry. I had been dying; I was unafraid and there was little pain. Then I come back, pissed off; I will have to die again, dammit. It takes another half hour to get me on a sled and return to shore.
Leo, Jim, and I are driven to friend’s houses, put in bathtubs of shallow, warm water, each of us screaming in pain as our frostbitten bodies slowly warm, each of us experiencing our genitals climbing back into our bodies. Later we’ll make vagina jokes.
The three rescuers are taken to a hospital in Peoria. They have severe frostbite. One of them has a finger amputated. One of them had gone on the hike to help deal with the grief of losing his wife to breast cancer, a few months earlier. The third man, Larry, a county ranger, and our leader, would never forgive himself.
My friend, the late Trinidadian playwright Mustafa Matura, when we talked about writer’s block at a writer’s meeting in Chicago, told us to sit and contemplate the blank page, or the empty screen’s blinking cursor, and type the very first word that came to us. I took his advice, without thinking about it, typing “water.”
Which would become, in 1987, the theme of my second play, “Moonlight Daring Us to Go Insane.” Which would become, in 2022, “The world is mostly water,” the first sentence of my memoir in progress, “Swimming on the Face of Time.”
I am fond of Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice.” Mr. Frost favors fire, but: “. . .I think I know enough of hate/To say that for destruction/ice is also great.”
When I’m old and feeble, dreading confinement in a nursing home, I can imagine walking on the frozen Mississippi. Stop, shed my coat, endure a few moments of pain, Boreas kindly freezing me.
And I sleep.
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Eugene Jones Baldwin is a journalist, essayist and poet. His book, “The Genehouse Chronicles,” was published in October by Written Tails Magazine. His book (with James Killion III), “A Black Soldier’s Letters Home: WWII,” was published in 2022.
© 2023, Eugene Jones Baldwin
Halfway Down the Stairs 