New Ice

An Apostle Islands postcard

All great art, I would often tell my students, is about transition — think of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” or the fingers of Adam and God forever almost but not quite touching in Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel painting. Such moments offer the tantalizing tang of hope yet forever hold their slight tension, that sweet, eternal anticipation.

So it is now with the ice on the coldest of mornings just at the edge of the lake. Out on the broad reach of Lake Superior, the water is still wide open, roiled by the November winds. But in the deepest, most protected parts of the bays and sloughs these mornings, there is the portend of transition and coming change.

It begins slowly, tentatively, as if literally testing the waters - a thin reach of fragile morning ice on the fringes of the quiet pools, gone with the first wind gust or melting with the first touch of the sunrise. But the next day, it is back again reaching a little further out, growing a little less fragile, a little thicker and more determined. In a few cold weeks, the lake as far as you can see from these shores may be still and white as a blank canvas. But for now, each morning brings the beginning brushstrokes of change, the beauty of transition, captured for a few fleeting but decisive moments in the art of new ice.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).