It’s February and, right on time, we’ve had the February thaw. Which means hockey nets and improvised goals have been pulled off the hockey rinks on Thurston Pond, lest they be lost if the ice melts. So far, the pond is still iced over, and the cold that’s followed the thaw may well make it possible for skaters to get back out on the ice.
Certainly, there’s ice everywhere else. Yesterday, it formed a thin enough layer that it followed the contours of whatever had iced—sidewalks, for instance. That meant that it had a bit of tack to it and, with the trusty crampons on my boots, I could make my way without mishap. There were spots where the ice was thicker or slicker but, for the most part, walking next to the sidewalk here and there sufficed.
The dog took a couple spills but, for him, the distance to the ground is a matter of inches, and his thick fur cushions the landing. Sometimes he slips but manages to avoid a fall, by dint of his working all four legs so fast that the motion is a blur, as in a cartoon. Fall or save, he continues undaunted. He’s an intrepid little fellow.
Today is slipperier than yesterday, the ice thicker. Where, yesterday, the paths through Sugarbush and by the pond were easy going, as they’re not flat to start with, there’s enough ice cover now that they’re flattening out and getting challenging. It’s good that February’s a short month.
When the dog and I reached the entrance to Sugarbush yesterday, flashes of color greeted us. It was a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers, big, boldly colored birds. We stood and watched them for a while. They didn’t seem to mind, and the bright red and black and white were brilliant against the softer palette of the winter woods.
Yesterday, from the vantage of the footbridge over Traver Creek, we stopped to watch another critter, this time a muskrat. Muskrats were part of the backdrop of our lives when we were kids, bustling about their marshy business in the canal behind our cottage. This muskrat, however, was out of the water on a sunny day. Its fur was lustrous in the sunshine.
Furthermore, this muskrat didn’t know it was being observed, so it poked about for some minutes among the rocks near the foot of the bridge, trying to stay out of sight and failing spectacularly. At length, it tucked its head and disappeared downstream under the ice. The edge of the ice was transparent so, for a moment, the long-tailed furry torpedo was still visible under the water, as if suspended in space, a winter vignette.
Wednesday evening, my husband and I attended a lecture at the Michigan Flight Museum, formerly known as the Yankee Air Museum. The place is at Willow Run Airport, which was built to produce B-24 bombers for the World War II war effort. Ric Mixter, an author and producer of documentaries, spoke on the missile lab that occupied the space during the Cold War. A major focus of the lab’s work was a missile defense system to protect the northern United States against airborne attacks, in that uneasy time after World War II when no one quite knew what to expect of the Soviet Union.
As is frequently the case with the talks on aviation history at the air museum, a great deal of material assumes information that I don’t have. As far as I can tell, however, the rest of the audience pretty much does. This is an educated group of people that slogs out to these talks, braving the winter cold and wind. Most members of the audience have backgrounds in one or more aspects of aviation. They are likely to have lived the history under discussion.
For my part, despite my partial understanding, I find the talks fascinating. The photographs, too. Wednesday’s talk included images of researchers my husband knew, Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks, for instance, the co-inventors of three-dimensional holography—developed during their time at Willow Run.
Also, the audience quite enjoyed learning that cars had been assembled at Willow Run for the model years 1952 and 1953. Sears, Roebuck and Co. offered a vehicle for sale and called it the Allstate. It had eighty horsepower and two doors and only came in blue. Mixter said he’d been surprised to learn you could order automobiles from Sears, but had then remembered that it used to be possible to order houses from the catalog as well.
It would be fun to hear Mixter speak on his other area of interest some time—shipwrecks.
7 February 2025