"The iridescent bubbles were beautiful.  But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtles eating them.  The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all."  – Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea








The old man waited until midnight to approach Lake Monona by moonlight.  He might cross the Yahara at its very final edge when nobody was awake, dragging his ice boat as if a child dragging a wagon full of fresh summer watermelon to sell in a neighbor's yard, sneaking along, a thief in the night.  The full moonlight was a better light than the day's sun for the ice was his own now, at night, and it was he and the sound of the skates cutting through the shrill crust.  What a soft glow was it all with the faint yellow squares shining down from the lit windows of the isthmus buildings.  You could not know this city without these night trips, he thought, as he shoved out his handmade wooden skiff where the previous patterns of blade slits from earlier in the day had frozen over and filled, and a fine buffer of cold fog floating above the lake had formed.  He was now at the age where he might talk out loud to a grandchild despite being alone and took great joy in demonstrating to her  the way to begin the rigging and set the sail to the weather of the wind.  What else was to be done, he thought, what else was there but to teach and show how the wind might catch inside the wide sail to best propel this skiff?  "You can only feel the wind at night, you see.  All the indicators are invisible.  Sometimes the leeward shifts and becomes the face of the weather helm and you must be very quick with your rutter and jib."  She did not know of such things, but understood the floating across the great  surface of diamonds at night.  "Your mother will wonder where you are," she would remember him saying later, and hold, as tight as any finger could, the side of the hull wondering if the boat might lift into the sky and beyond.  Sometimes it did.