The Sound Of The River

We've been having a cold snap over the last week, with only one day above freezing and several nights down in the teens. As a result, the Susquehanna River has lots of ice on it. The first time I drove down Front Street on Saturday morning, it looked like it was frozen over, which is far from being the case, although of course it has happened in the past.

I've had a chance to look at it every evening for the last week since we changed our evening routine a few weeks ago -- D-Jo is now on bathe-the-kid duty, giving me time to take the dogs for a walk. It's a responsibility we'd been slacking on, and D-Jo decided we needed to get back into the habit of a daily walk. If you have dogs, you should walk them at least once a day, and if you don't (and one of them is a 4-year-old, 90-pound Doberman), you are asking for trouble. Both dogs seem to be in much better spirits now that they're getting out regularly, which means they aren't quite as needy and annoying during the evening -- they're content to just sit on the couch with us.

Typically I walk the two blocks to the river and then walk for a block or so before cutting back over. Sometimes we end up walking down what I think is the prettiest block in Midtown, the 1600 block of Penn. Other times, though, especially when its as cold as its been, instead of walking on the bike path I go down the steps and right next to the river. When it's this cold, there's no one there, and I can let them off their leashes, take off Jake's muzzle, and let them run around like proper dogs should.

When I did that this evening, I heard a sound I hadn't heard before. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but once the wind died down I realized that the gentle muffled scraping sound I was hearing was the sound of the big sheets of ice rubbing together as the current carried them down the river. It was an incongruous sound to hear in the middle of a city, a little bit eerie, and very cool.