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Sometimes the very act of skating seemed to create a crack, so that you could feel its break directly under your skate, and the sound directly under you goes booming across the lake. Skating on the lake at night was especially fun. If it was really dark you couldn't see where you were going, especially skating very fast backwards, but it didn't matter because you had all the room in the world.
It was said and I heard it that an ice boat way back when father was a young man somehow sunk in an open water patch and my father dove in and rescued the guy. Many times laying in bed at night, did I imagine myself trapped under the ice having fallen in a small hole and could not find it again, and having to survive by breathing the air bubbles or white patches under the ice.
It got dark at six so after dinner we skated in the dark. There wasn't much in the way of light unless there was a moon. We would go to the neighbor's dock on the channel side of the island. They were summer people and almost never home between October and June. It was a wood platform with a couple of wooden benches as a cut-out in the wood seawall, and we put on the skates as fast as ever possible in the freezing cold. In those days there were no rubber skate guards so you couldn't put one's skates on in the warm comfy house and walk down in your skates. But skating in the dark was the most fun, a bit like flying especially if it were hard to even see the ice.
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