Cutting Through the Ice
text and photos by Dorothy Dow Crane

The Penobscot Bay pulls into Rhinecliff dock.

At 10 am The US Coast Guard icebreaking cutter Penobscot Bay pulls up to the Rhinecliff dock. Clean shaven crew members in bright orange Coast Guard jackets pull me aboard, assuring that I don’t get tangled up in the blue lines coiled like orderly snakes on the deck.

For weeks I have been engaged in a full-out battle with the winter’s ice. It has become my life. The packed snow on our driveway has hardened into an ice field. The journey from my front door down the walk and up the driveway to my car has taken on the quality of an extreme winter sport. The enemy ice threatens overhead as well. Our tired north-facing roof is covered with snow. Despite my husband’s best efforts to scrape the edge with a telescoping roof rake while balanced precariously near the top of an eight-foot stepladder, the dreaded ice dam grows larger. We awaken to a drip-drip-drip in the middle of the night, haul ourselves out of bed, and yet again reposition the attic pans under a roof scheduled to be replaced one season too late. Small glaciers are forming on roofs everywhere in our neighborhood. When the AboutTown editor offered the opportunity for a ride on a Coast Guard icebreaker, how could I refuse?

Air temperature: 13 degrees, up a bit from the single digit low over night. Winds: calm. I’ve been tossed out into a world of blue and white. The frigid geometry is defined by the horizontal frozen Hudson plotted north to south against the sheer upwardness of the blue sky above. In the channel on the far side of the river, a tug liberated from the ice just this morning pushes a barge upriver.

Water temperature: 21°F. The ice around the dock where I boarded the cutter is smooth and white, but the shipping channel on the Kingston side is a watery road covered with milky broken glass—brash ice—4 to 6 inches thick. Some chunks are well over three feet, much bigger than they appear from the bridge when I’m driving to Kingston or even from the shore. Slush for giants. The grinding, scraping noise of the ice sliding along the hull is constant.

Breaking the Dinner Plate
It’s only mid morning, but the Penobscot Bay has broken up the ice in the shipping channel three times since daybreak. While I was drinking morning tea in my cozy kitchen, the cutter freed the tug and barge that just passed by. Commanding Officer Griffin smiles warmly, welcomes me aboard, and announces we’re going south towards Hyde Park to some unbroken ice near Esopus Island. He wants to push the cutter to test for a suspected engine problem. Five of us stand on the bridge looking out at the whiteness: four extremely focused young men in marine blue working uniforms and me with my camera slung around my neck. This is the navigation heart of the cutter. The windows on all sides allow constant surveillance of the surrounding ice, including the eagles that land on it and the coyotes that cross it. Computer screens glow with information: location, river depth, sneaky sandbars, bridge pilings. Radar, GPS, AIS—abbreviations for navigation systems that tell you more than that you’re simply on the river near Rhinecliff. Small blue pouches are tucked here and there, handy yet out of the way. These contain emergency fire gear—a special turtleneck, a flash hood, and a pair of flame-resistant, arm’s-length gloves. No, the Commanding Officer says, he’s never had to use any of this equipment. And then he knocks on the nearest piece of fake wood.

On the bridge of the cutter.

The informal chatter about coyotes crossing the river and flame resistant gloves stops. “Rudder amidships.” We’re slowing down, but the vibration is increasing. An unbroken expanse of ice now surrounds us—it’s as though we’ve been plucked up and set down in the center of a huge white dinner plate. “Back to one-eight-zero.” “Left 10 degrees rudder.” “Increase left to 20 degrees.” The ice ahead is six to eight inches, unbroken, hypnotically featureless. It’s a relief to look back over the stern to the mark we’ve made on the whiteness: a swirling trail of newly broken, pristine white chunks floating on foaming river water the propeller has churned up from below. “Steady on course one-eight-zero.” “Ahead hard.” Now the ice is even thicker. The cutter slows, the vibration increases. To get through really thick ice the Penobscot Bay does what any of us would instinctively do—she backs up, revs her engines, and charges hard like a battering ram into the ice ahead. At the same time she exhales compressed air through openings at water level to keep the ice from dragging on the hull and slowing her down. “Hard right rudder.” “Easy right rudder.” I’m having a hard time keeping my balance. Beneath the straining vibration the crew listen for ominous engine groans. They check for abnormal readings. The suspected engine difficulty has not reoccurred. Now we turn around and head north towards the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.

Soon we overtake the tug and barge that the Penobscot Bay liberated from the ice earlier this morning. The Scott C is shoving its massive load north to Albany at five knots. These barges, loaded with heating oil and gasoline and pushed up and down the river all winter by chubby tugs, are the most important reason to keep the channel open. If it iced over, 27 million people in the northeast would be affected. The cutter crew enjoy this work. They tell me how the slushy brash ice, so slippery looking, can build up in front of a barge and stop it cold. They explain the benefits of clearing a lane 250 feet wide—two barge widths—and how the tide constantly shifts the lane and pushes ice back into it. Ice jams aren’t just trouble for barges; they can also threaten our drinking water supply. In the winter of 2009 the Penobscot Bay spent an entire day (a day when most of us were probably struggling to get out of our driveways) freeing the ice piled into the river bend at the Crum Elbow water intake so our taps would keep flowing. The crew takes deep satisfaction in keeping the waterway open in winter. It is an exhibit of their skill.

Tending the channel comes with a whole list of winter chores, akin to putting on your snow tires and wrapping your shrubs against snacking deer. The watery passage is marked with buoys. Every fall a buoy tender replaces the playful bobbing red and green summer buoys with slimmer, special winter buoys designed to pop above the ice. From the deck of the Penobscot Bay these buoys appear small, but they are over 20 feet long and extend 10 feet above the ice. On this cold white expanse one loses all sense of scale. Small lumps on the ice are actually larger than tombstones. The crushed ice we leave in our wake looks like what I buy for the picnic cooler, but it’s really the size of my kitchen chairs. On the eastern shore the toy-size Amtrak train races towards Albany.

As we make our way north the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, a slender metal thread arching gently over the ice, comes into view. Support pilings rise up from the ice like giant stepladders. I’m beginning to read the ice a bit now. The collection of what looks like misshapen igloos under the center of the bridge means there’s a sandbar underneath. The river is shallow here. The bridge is 150 feet above us, but the floor of the river, at its deepest point in the channel beneath the bridge, is only a little more than 30 feet below. And ahead? Always, always more ice. We might be on a broad white highway headed for the Arctic. The river surface here has become a huge blank jigsaw puzzle, the pieces so still that I am sure I could step from one to another just like the red fox they spotted this morning. Then I look out over the stern at the glassy shards upended by the six-foot standing wave left in our wake; I hear the ice scraping against the hull, and I’m not so sure. As the channel swings from the Kingston side of the river back to the Tivoli side, Blithewood mansion appears, stolidly presiding over her sloping white lawn. Cruger Island creeps up, huddling close to the smaller, rounder Magdalen—the two islands might be sea creatures floating in the fur-like whorls the ice has formed closer to shore. I scan these shores with local eyes—there’s my friend’s house on Friendship Street in Tivoli, there’s the old Catholic Worker Farm at Rose Hill, there’s Clermont with its spectacular May blooming lilacs—comforting landmarks for me but irrelevant to the 16 man crew navigating by digital maps that meticulously denote both the safe and the deadly contours hidden under the ice. The men set out from Bayonne, not Rhinebeck, and they’ll be on the river two weeks, sometimes mooring at the Rhinecliff dock, and sometimes putting down anchor in a protected spot on the river. A dark duck with a white head flies by. In the distance I can make out the patch of open water, staked out by swans, where the Roeliff Jansen Kill spills into the Hudson. It’s reassuring to see life where so much color has been bleached out.

The Rhinecliff-Kingston Bridge.

Still north. The Saugerties Lighthouse. The Rip Van Winkle Bridge. The Hudson-Athens Lighthouse marking the hazards of Middle Ground Flats. From the surface of the frozen river, each landmark might be part of a custom made Hudson River toy set, undersized in the enveloping whiteness. The ice chatters against the hull. Another Amtrak train charges south.

As we approach the city of Hudson the shoreline changes. The sloping lawns and tree covered hillsides of Hudson River estates give way to a gritty tableau of old smokestacks, abandoned plants, mysterious piles covered with tarps, mounds of dirty snow, and the ghosts of the whaling industry that once flourished here. The red and green summer river buoys reclining in winter storage stand out on shore. Although the ice is different here—in spots white has given way to blue—the sound of the ice grinding against the hull doesn’t change. Conversation on the Penobscot Bay bridge echoes the view: the characteristics of loose versus packed brash ice. Rafting the ice. Ice rot. Choke point ice.

At the Four Mile Point anchorage buoy above Hudson we make a casting turn for a single screw ship and head back south. But first we slow down. Headed towards us is the steadfast Scott C and its barge, still plugging north to Albany, still at 5 knots. The slushy track is narrow here, so we stop and wait for the tug and barge to pass so our movement won’t push ice into their path.

The Penobscot Bay plows south. Opposite Germantown at Silver Point, where six cement silos guard the river like sci-fi sentries, a tiny speck comes into view, also heading south. Our radar identifies this speck as the Wire, a smaller Coast Guard icebreaker, two and a half miles ahead. Executive Officer Bender explains that we’ll carve a swathe through the ice as we pass the Wire so that the Wire can then pick up speed. Here comes the math problem: If the Wire is two and a half miles ahead going 5 knots, and our speed is 14 knots, how long before we overtake them? I expect the Executive Officer to plug these numbers into a computer program but instead he uncaps a blue dry erase marker and works it out on the window. Then I notice there’s a marker by almost every window.

By midafternoon the sun has gone in and the wind has picked up. Chill leaks through the cutter’s bridge windows. The swans on the mouth of the Roeliff Janson Kill have tucked in their heads. When we’re almost at Tivoli I call my friend Kathy to tell her that we’re about to pass her house and that I’ll go on deck and wave at her, hoping she’ll use her binoculars to see me, hoping I won’t appear as small as I feel. Yes, she later told me, she saw the Penobscot Bay, but no, I wasn’t visible on its deck.

There, ahead, is the Rhinecliff dock where they’ll drop me off. We’ll pass the dock and then come in from the south. Outside, the deck crew begin to position the light blue tie lines. Inside on the bridge the turn radius is being calculated. And ahead, on the ice by the dock, stands Hudson River iceboater John Sperr in his old white fisherman’s sweater who, with the help of Mary Dynes, is assembling the century old Orion. Commanding Officer Griffin confesses that he’s never landed a vessel with people standing on the surface just 50 feet off the bow. “There’s a lot of trust going on here,” he says. The Penobscot Bay slows to an almost imperceptible crawl and makes it to the dock without upsetting the ancient wooden iceboat and the small civilian crew putting it together.

Iceboat on the frozen river, near Rhinecliff.

Celebrating the Ice
The next afternoon Mary Dynes is there again, along with seven sail-driven iceboats on the river at Rhinecliff, almost 50 people, two small dogs with very cold paws, and a baby in a stroller, all present to celebrate ice so smooth, so solid, so expansive that one can now sail to the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. A card table has been set up with a pot of soup, crackers, and chocolate candy. Men and women heavily wrapped in wool move between their tool kits and their partially assembled iceboats. Ivory-colored canvas sails glow in the late day sun. I walk out to the middle of the river, but the Penobscot Bay is nowhere in sight. Making my way back to the dock, I overhear conversations about wind. Not enough. Too much. Flukey. Steady out of the southeast. Gusty out of the northwest. There are conversations about ice. Early winter black ice, deep and glassy, formed when the temperature first plunges. Fragile layers of shell ice, formed in just hours, that shatter into diamond-like shards as the ice boat runners skim through it. Late season snow ice—what we’re standing on now—white with trapped air from snowfall after snowfall. The train pulls into the station and out again. A gull protests. And Mary wonders when the Penobscot Bay will return to the dock so they can compare notes on the day’s ice.