The Ice-Out ledger is now in its fourth binding, and if you look closely at the spine, you can see the places where the previous three broke — where the threads gave out under the accumulated weight of ninety-nine winters of betting on the weather.
That ledger contains the names of men and women who have been dead for half a century, entered in ink that has turned the color of dried blood. It contains the entry of Roland Fournier, who won in 1984 and whose son Dale has been trying to match him ever since. It contains sixty-four consecutive entries from Lydia Barnes, named for a ship that was launched forty-four years before she was born and that she has never seen except in a photograph on her mantelpiece.
There is something in that ledger that is worth preserving even beyond the five-dollar entry fees and the hand-painted plaque and the potluck in the community hall basement.
It is the simple fact of participation. Every winter, several hundred people — residents, former residents, people who have never set foot in Willow Creek but heard about the tradition from a cousin — all fix their attention on the same patch of ice on the same twelve-acre pond, and they commit, in writing, to a prediction about the natural world. They are wrong more often than they are right, and they enter again the next year anyway.
That is not a betting pool. That is a community ritual. And in a town that sometimes struggles to find common ground, the Ice-Out is the one thing that nearly everyone agrees matters.
The 99th Ice-Out is upon us. Let the ice melt when it will. We will be here, watching.