Early in the second week of February, shortly before departing on my drive to Florida, I took a walk down through the woods and across overgrown pastures to the Wallkill River, at the northwest foot of my property. The river lies at a distance of about 500 yards, and 110 feet in elevation below my house. As I neared my destination, a flock of a couple of hundred Canada geese, who'd been observing my approach from an ice shelf along the opposite shore, finally decided I was getting too close, and took to the air amid a cacophony of honking. But a half dozen of them apparently felt otherwise: with 40 yards of open water between us, they remained on the broad ice shelf, and at one point performed a little promenade, playing follow-the-leader, as if practicing for an upcoming parade or graduation ceremony. The woods and meadows were still covered with a well-consolidated snow cover of seven or eight inches. Small ice flows no more than a few inches thick occasionally floated by with the current, pieces of the frozen shelves extending out from the river banks that were breaking loose in the thaw that was just beginning.

The scene was one of great beauty and, once the honking had quieted down, serenity. I have taken the same walk from time to time to the same spot on the shore of the Wallkill since early childhood, often taking a seat on the great, rounded chunk of white Shawangunk conglomerate that rests anchored in the mud, just above the water line. In other seasons of the year I've often seen a great blue heron rise gracefully from the river, or a fish jump up to catch a flying insect. As a child, I once watched a pair of what I believe were otters frolicking in shallow water near the shore. A friend who hunts deer from a tree stand every fall on the overgrown flood plain has seen two bobcats at different times, from his perch.

But late winter is, or at least used to be, a uniquely dynamic time for the river, for this is when the ice breaks up. There is an old concrete dam crossing the river in the hamlet of Wallkill, a few miles upstream from my location, which holds back water for a distance of a mile and a half, or half the way to Walden. This elongated lake freezes every winter, but in recent decades it has often broken up when the season is barely half over, or has broken and refrozen a couple of times, with the ice never getting more than a few inches thick. Years ago when winters were colder, the ice above the dam sometimes froze ten to fifteen inches, and even the briskly moving waters below the dam, that extend downstream almost to New Paltz, were largely frozen, with only narrow ribbons of free-flowing water between the ice shelves that built out from the shores.

It takes not only a cold winter to accomplish this, but a dry one, when the current is restrained, or a winter so bitterly cold that there is little melting of the snow pack and little ground water seeping into the river. The ice on the river does not melt away, of course (though thawing does help loosen the bonds between ice and earth along the shorelines). Rather, the river breaks up into huge ice flows when a rainy thaw raises the water level of the river, lifting and breaking the ice from underneath. When this occurs quickly and suddenly, just when the ice has reached, or remains, near its maximum possible thickness of the season, the results can be spectacular.

I remember standing at the same place at the foot of my property as a teenager one day when the ice had evidently just broken up and spilled over the dam an hour or so earlier. The open river was crowded with foot-thick flows, five or ten feet square. One was hung up on a big rock out in the river whose top was just about at the water level, but soon another flow came crashing into the stranded one, knocking it free and taking its place on the rock. This scenario was repeated every half-minute or so.

Great blocks of ice, half covered in mud and debris, would often remain along the shore well into springtime. Some trees growing close by the water's edge bear huge old scars in their trunks, two or three feet above mean water line, evidence of repeated impacts from fast-moving flows that might weigh close to a ton. But there are no fresh scars. Like ancient lunar craters, they bear testament to a past in which kinetic energy was much more in evidence that at present.

I am told that when thick river ice broke up and went out over the dam, the sound could be heard throughout the hamlet of Wallkill. People would gather on the bridge to enjoy the spectacle. I have never seen it happen, and it is one of the few such frustrations I must live with. There were times when I made the three-mile drive a few times a day for three or four days, hoping to arrive at the right moment, only to have the ice go out sometime overnight.

Three consecutive winters beginning with the 1976/77 season were especially dramatic on the river. The first of these saw the months of October through January persistently colder than average, with the coldest January since 1920: Lake Mohonk reported a mean temperature of 16.8? for the month. On January 28 the temperature soared to the low 40s for perhaps the first time since Thanksgiving. Then a cold front blew through with 40-60 mph gusts, and by morning the thermometer was back down to zero. The river ice was thick, and went out below the dam on the night of February 24-25 and above the dam two and a half days later.

The next winter was uneventful till mid January, when nearly two feet of snow fell in three storms during a single week. Then the blizzard of February 6-7 brought about 18-20 inches of extremely drifted snow. Temperatures remained frigid, the river freezing solid along most of its length. The snow cover was never less than a foot deep through the second week of March, when our "January thaw" finally arrived. I believe this is the time I recall when rain and melting snow poured into the Wallkill to create a swiftly moving river, a foot or two deep, flowing overtop of the ice, smoothing and grooming it. But the ice held fast and the cold returned, freezing what remained of this new water. From the Galeville bridge, the Wallkill looked like an alpine glacier, a nearly smooth expanse of linearly striated ice, squeezed between the banks and deep enough to cover the rocks underneath. The ice did not go out over the Wallkill dam until the night of March 21-22, which may be an all-time record.

The winter of 1978/79 saw a rainy January, with floods toward the end of the month, following the ice storm I wrote about in my last column. But then the weather turned arctic. An 11-day period in February saw nine nights below zero, with a mean temperature for the entire week and a half of only +4? according to my records. Ice formed quickly and thickly both above the Wallkill dam and all the way downstream. On February 24 a rapidly rising river broke up the ice below the dam, and this piled up just south of New Paltz, where the current becomes placid. Only a day or two later, the ice above the dam went out and roared down the open river, now at flood stage. It encountered the ice jam just formed, creating even bigger blockages that enhanced the flooding already taking place.

Such spectacular events very rarely occur anymore. I returned from Florida February 23 to find the river open both above and below the dam, and no ice flows lining the shores. A generation is growing up that never gathered on the Wallkill bridge to watch a mile and a half long sheet of foot-thick ice go out over the dam, and sadly, that spectacle is one I may never live to see myself.

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