We're not there just yet. But we are hovering at around 30 below as I write this, late at night, under an enormous but not yet full moon that played havoc with our Star Gazing earlier this evening.
Even with the moonshadow, our guests had a blast learning how to track from the Big Dipper to the North Star, to Cassiopeai; from Orion to the Pleiades, to Sirius. We were bundled up against the cold, and nobody needed a flashlight, with the moon shine reflecting back from the snow.
In the silence, you could hear the lake snap, and growl. It's not a noise that you hear unless you are outside at night, when it is really cold, and it is not a noise you soon forget. Like loon tremolo in the spring and summer, this is a truly Northern song, the song the lake sings when it is making ice. As water freezes, it expands. As the bay freezes over, that ice expands too, pushing against the shores. Those shores are made of stern stuff -- fabulous high quality Muskoka Granite. It hasn't moved in millenia and it has no intention of moving now, just because of a little ice-push. That causes tension to build in the ice -- it's the classic immoveable object meeting up with the irresistable force. To release that pent up energy, the ice will crack and shift as fault lines form.
And that is what causes the lake to sound like someone shaking a sheet of metal, like a low growl, or a sudden snap. Freezing lakes aren't silent -- despite the serene surface stillness.
Winter is here. For true. We know, because tonight we heard the lake sing.
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