Tine Searches for an Ice Floe

Tine set out on her walk alone again this afternoon, sad to say.

Alfred Wainwright, preeminent guide to the English Lakeland fells, might think that "walking alone is poetry, walking in a group only prose," but what about walking as a couple? That was the general drift of Tine's thoughts as she looked about her on a rather dreary day.

The snow will perk things up a bit," she decided, as flakes started to land on her nose and cheeks and settle in her hat and hair.

"A light always cheers things up, too," Tine thought. "Nothing like a little incandescence, is there?" she might have said to Rubob.



Tine felt "chilled," as Rubob would say, even though she was well bundled up. Mr. Wainwright, she recalled reading, rarely wore a coat on his walks; he said it would only soak through anyway.


Wainwright, sensibly wearing a coat


He wrote in his guidebooks that he never got sick, but his son, who was dragged along on the lakeland walks for many years, said that Wainwright frequently caught colds. After one chilly, wet walk, the son said, Wainwright warmed himself up with ten cups of tea.

"Yes, a cup of tea would be rather nice right now," Tine thought." I wonder whether Rubob is having a cup of tea now? Yes, he probably is having a cup of plum-flavored tea at this very moment -- or black raspberry. How revolting. I'll bet Wainwright enjoyed a proper cup of tea, without the durn flavorings."

A cheerful Santa waved to Tine over a letter basket, or so Tine imagined.



Ascribing animate behavior to inanimate objects -- that would be the "pathetic fallacy," Tine had read recently.

"Walking alone isn't poetic -- it's pathetic," Tine said, chuckling to herself. The snow was starting to fall a little heavier, and Tine was beginning to enjoy herself.

She crossed the busy main "thoroughfare," as Rubob would say, and passed the home of the Hysterical Society.

"I wonder why it's called the Hysterical Society," Tine thought. "Maybe it's some sort of miniature lunatic asylum -- a cottage for the incurably insane. I'd better give it a wide berth."



Tine's thoughts do tend to wander when Rubob isn't around to rein them in. Rubob would be discussing something sensible, something practical such as declining property values.

"Could they be declining due to the proximity of a small lunatic asylum?" she'd ask Rubob, but he wouldn't be listening. He'd be running through the day's business headlines.

"Perhaps subprime mortgages shouldn't have been offered to the incurably insane," Tine would offer, but Rubob would be preoccupied with thoughts of his own.

Tine was headed down toward the river, and she thought she'd first have a peek at old man Winchell's estate. She stole silently through the gate, wondering a little about the footsteps she was leaving in the snow.

"They're too tiny to see," Rubob would say.



Tine saw the light on in the downstairs window, a warming presence. "It must be the old man having his afternoon tea," she thought.

Winchell Smith wrote and produced the silent film "Way Down East," and it was he who brought Lillian Gish to Tine's village to star in the movie in 1919. Gish played a poor country girl, Anna Moore, who's tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer named Lennox Sanderson. At the end of the film, Anna collapses on an ice floe on the Farmington River during a blizzard. The ice floe is headed directly for a waterfall, but she's rescued by the man who loves her in the nick of time.



Poor little Tine, who was quarreling with Rubob, thought she might just throw herself onto an ice floe in the Farmington River. Fortunately, there were no ice floes on the river at this time of year. Nevertheless, Tine thought she might wend her way down to the river and have a look.

She admired the gate at the Winchell estate as she turned back onto Garden Street. "Worthy of Lennox Sanderson's grand house," she thought, casting herself out onto the pavement of Garden Street.



Continuing on alone in the snow -- "blinding blizzard," Tine thought -- she passed a house looking rather forlorn on such a gray day.



Rubob loves houses with porches, Tine reflected. A little ways past the house, she turned into Riverside Cemetery to look at the river and the meadows beyond.



"Dreary," Tine thought. But a dog running free in the meadows seemed to think otherwise, and he bounded up toward Tine and rolled in the snow next to her.

Tine left the cemetery and passed a little house with two welcoming porch lights.



"No time to stop for tea," she thought. "I'm off to the river to find an ice floe."

On her way down Garden Street, Tine passed the site of the old canal basin, where someone had, in fact, perished in the Farmington River. Foone, one of the Africans who'd gained his freedom after the Amistad slave ship rebellion of 1839, had stayed in Farmington in 1843. He drowned while swimming in the river one afternoon after working in the meadows, perhaps because of homesickness for his family and village in Sierra Leone. The canal is gone now, and the basin has been filled in.



Tine turned down Mill Lane and walked down to the old Gristmill and the river.

"There's the perilous waterfall," she thought. Some of "Way Down East" had been filmed near here, but the ice floe scenes had been filmed in White River Junction, Vermont. Tine, however, didn't know this, and she was searching for ice floes.



A flock of ducks had staked out a little inlet just below Tine's vantage point.



"No ice floes here," Tine thought, and she walked around the Gristmill to look at the falls from above.



A lantern cast a warm glow over the scene.



At the Gristmill, a chef was busy preparing dinner. Tine thought with concern about the ducks by the riverbank.



"Well, no sign of ice floes at all," she thought. "Perhaps W. D. Griffiths filmed the ice floe scenes somewhere else, such as White River Junction."

"You see, Rubob, I do know a thing or two," Tine announced to Rubob, who was sadly absent on this walk.

"You do indeed, Tine," Rubob would have said.

"And much of it I've learned from books obtained right over there," Tine would say, pointing to the Millrace Bookstore. It looked very inviting, but Rubob didn't like the idea of Tine spending all of her hard-earned wages on books. "Couldn't you just go to the library?" Rubob would ask.

Tine looked wisfully at the bookstore.



She walked back up the hill from the Gristmill to Garden Street, and decided she'd see how Miss Porter's School looked in the snow -- "and in the gloaming," she added to herself.

It was transformed by the warm glow of the lanterns along the pathway.



A girl in a red coat with a fluffy white collar was twirling in the snow on the path.

Across the street from school, a snowman was all lit up with happiness over the snow; either that or he'd swallowed a lightbulb like Uncle Fester on "The Addams Family."



"Congo," as the Congregational Church was known at one time at Miss Porters, was looking not quite white next to the snow. The once-gleaming white walls had been sullied by the traffic of the ordinary world -- or at least the traffic along the village's main thoroughfare.



And the old tin shop house, farther down the main thoroughfare, was looking a trifle yellow.



"It, too, is cheered by lights," Tine thought.

"It's not quite the shade of white I would have chosen," Rubob would have said. "It's unfortunate."

"I don't know that I agree, Rubob," Tine would have replied.

As she arrived home, the old rooster next door turned his tail feathers toward Tine. Perhaps he was just looking over at Rattlesnake Mountain.



"All in all a very pleasant walk," Tine thought, but it would have been a little more pleasant with Rubob -- or perhaps the odd ice floe."