A winter spin on the river was just the ticket
It’s been a pretty good year for ice. We’ve had warm spells, certainly, but there have also been periods of frigid weather and light snowfall that lasted long enough to turn our lakes and rivers into sheets of glass for weeks at a time. That’s been welcome news for ice skaters, ice fishermen, and ice boaters, particularly those who recall last winter’s slush and slop.
I hadn’t skated in years but, on the rumor of good ice, I drove over to the Humboldt Park lagoon a couple of weeks ago, laced up my vintage Bauers, and pushed off from shore. It quickly became apparent that my skills had not improved with age, but that wasn’t the ice’s fault. Except for the occasional deposit of frozen goose poop, the surface was smooth, the ice was thick, and the going was easy — for good skaters, anyway.
Not many people were taking advantage of the lagoon’s frigid bounty. A spirited game of pick-up hockey was underway at one end of the pond, but there was plenty of room to maneuver. I tottered around until my ankles burned and called it a day.
I would have had much more company a century ago. Before we succumbed to the spell of Facebook postings, YouTube videos, sports telecasts, Skype conversations, Twitter feeds, Netflix movies, electronic games, and a million other Things on Screens, Americans spent much more time outdoors, even in the depths of winter. When the ice was good, skaters ventured out to glide and spin all over the region.
Their favorite destination was the Milwaukee River. Ever since it was first dammed near North Ave. in 1843, the stream had been a long, narrow lake stretching as far north as Capitol Drive. It was busiest during the summer months, of course, but hordes of skaters descended on the river as soon as it froze. Someone watching from shore could have seen races, romances, pratfalls, hockey games, and crack-thewhip lines at any point along the stream.
A few skaters were overachievers. Last year, I stumbled across a slim volume titled “A Little Journey on Skates” in the Central Library’s Rare Books Room. Its author, Joseph Bell, Jr., was a draftsman for Ferry & Clas, the architectural firm responsible for the Pabst Mansion, St. John’s Cathedral, and the Central Library itself. On New Year’s Day in 1895, Bell and nine companions, most of them Ferry & Clas employees, skated on the river from North Ave. all the way to Thiensville — a distance of 18 miles!
River ice is notoriously less trustworthy than the type formed on still water, but that didn’t deter the adventurers. They carried no life rings and no ropes — only sticks to help each other out in case one broke through the ice. Even those weren’t necessary, Bell noted: “As the river is deep enough in but a few places to drown a man standing upright, … our precautions on this head were rendered naught.” The skaters used the river itself for drinking water and carried miscellaneous supplies in their knapsacks, including ingredients for Tom and Jerrys.
Wearing knickerbockers, thick sweaters, and strap-on skates, the
group left Milwaukee at 10 a.m. “Many skaters were upon the ice for the first few miles north,” wrote Bell, “but we had only to climb over the first weir of frozen waterfalls where the dull roar of the under cataract sounded solemn and uncanny, to leave behind all these ephemeral merrymakers and the last view of the city.” That solemn cataract was most likely the modest waterfall below the beer garden in today’s Estabrook Park.
The real fun started once they had the river to themselves. “But the skating!,” Bell enthused, “such skating as it was! such ice and such a winter’s day as one might wait an entire season for to see — not a stirring of the air, save that we made ourselves as we rushed along the smooth black surface….”
The skaters were on uncharted ice above the falls, with plenty of hazards ahead. Their leader plunged into waistdeep water at the first flour mill, and Bell himself belly-flopped through “a twoinch layer of slush water spread over a surface of sunken ice.” But there were pleasant surprises as well: “In shallow parts of the midstream we could see the fishes through ice clear as window glass.”
The Milwaukeeans reached Thiensville in 3 hours and 40 minutes, traveling at an average speed of five miles an hour. The pot of gold at the end of their rainbow was a prearranged “royal good dinner” of turkey and goose at Memmler’s Inn, a German establishment on the river. The skaters were, Bell reported, famished: “I am afraid the smiling folk, who gazed at us through the sliding panel from the kitchen, must have wondered if we had ever had a square meal in our lives…. In half an hour the table looked as if a typhoon had struck it amidships.”
After a full meal and a few drinks, most of the travelers were ready to take the train back to the city. Not Joseph Bell and two of his hardier companions. Even though night was falling, they decided to skate home by moonlight, and that, according to Bell, was the best part of the journey: “On we sped at ever increasing pace, until we had reached the limit for safety, and only tempering our speed when crackling surface ice and an opaque appearance of the river ahead, warned us of the vicinity of rapids underneath and ticklish skating above.”
Despite their best efforts to read the river, the skaters experienced “several somersaults,” and one of them plunged into a waterhole 2 feet deep. The trio reached the North Ave. bridge at the stroke of eight, with their clothing “frozen hard and clanking like steel armour.” Bell still faced a long streetcar ride home to the west side, but he had no regrets: “Truly it was entrancing that return trip, and romantically beautiful — by far the most conspicuous recollection that remains to me of the entire outing.”
I’m one of many paddlers who has canoed the river between Thiensville and Milwaukee, but the odds of anyone replicating Joseph Bell’s marathon journey on skates are remote indeed. The world is warmer today than it was in 1895, limiting the potential for good ice, and we’ve become more risk-averse as a people. But Bell’s chronicle is a welcome reminder of winter’s unique potential for fun. You certainly don’t have to skate to Thiensville and back, but the draftsman and his buddies had the right idea. Unplug, they might tell their modernday descendants. Turn off those tyrannical screens. Get outside and enjoy winter like true four-season Wisconsinites.