It is April. The spring is finally beginning to pull Prince Edward Island out of the worst winter it has seen in years. The temperatures are slightly above freezing during the day and drop back down below zero once the sun goes down.
My friends and I decide to go for a drive on one of these transitional days. In the car with me is Ellis, James, Jakob and the driver, Wade. I had not seen much of Wade since he’d left for university the previous autumn; nor had I seen much of James, although we still went to the same school. All of us had been close at one point, and hanging out again felt strange because we were not as close as we once had been.
High school was already over for Ellis and Wade, Jakob still had one more year, and James and I were two months from graduating. There was not much time left for us to all spend time together.
- ••
We find a good place to stop. We’re at a provincial park on a coastal drive that follows Prince Edward Island’s North Shore. To our left we’d spotted a small bay with a plane of ice chunks beached on the sand, and extending out into the shallows of the small inlet. Each ice-cake was the size of a small car, and something about them inspired Wade to pull over. We exit the car, and he shouts, “Who’s gonna come cake jumpin’?”
Jakob quickly agrees to walk out on the ice with Wade, and after some convincing from the others, I do as well. I decided to go despite my fear – a fear that had always kept me from following before now.
Before Wade, Jakob and I make our way onto the ice, Wade decided to take his sweater off. If he is running around over ice, he won’t need it, and if he were to fall in, he would want it to be dry. That’s his logic anyway. He tosses his sweater in the car and catches up with the rest of us.
The first few ice-cakes were beached without any water under them, but the farther we went out onto the pack of ice, the more water pooled beneath us. The deeper the water, the stronger the desire to turn around. Walking on ice like this is one of the few things that terrifies me.
When the urge to turn back finally seized me, for reasons I still don’t understand, I kept going. We walked and hopped farther out into the bay until the only thing keeping the ice against the shore were the waves pushing them in. Wade and Jakob continued to the farthest iceberg while I waited a few behind. That was good enough for me; it was one more fear conquered than I’d planned on when I woke up that morning.
- ••
I work my way back to the beach as Wade and Jakob head around the cove. Ellis and James are skipping rocks in a long pool of water on the beach. I join them, although I feel as if I am intruding. James and I used to be good friends, and now we hardly exchange nods in school.
The conversation is forced and rigid. An hour passes, Wade and Jakob re-joined us and we decide it’s a good time to leave. We walk up to the car, and at this point, Wade realizes he threw his keys in with the sweater and locked us out of the car. This marks the start of our four-hour wait at the side of the road.
A friend agreed to drive out a spare set of keys from town, but directions seem to be an issue for him. At the least, it was a good opportunity to spend some time together. Spend some time with Wade, who I hadn’t seen in a while and felt sorry for because he was shivering without a sweater; and spend some time with James, who I hadn’t talked to in a while.
James seemed distracted. He was pre-occupied because his cell phone was locked in the car. He feared he might get in trouble with his girlfriend because he wasn’t answering her messages. As our time together ticked by, he became increasingly irritated by me and the rest of the guys, and this fear of “being in the dog house” dominated his mind throughout the wait.
This reminded me why James and I stopped hanging out. He’d left his friends behind and spent all of his time with his significant other. Which is alright. Sometimes the wind packs the ice in; sometimes it drifts away.
I stopped worrying about losing touch with the “Jameses’” of my high school life. I still had Ellis, Jakob and Wade, even though he locked the keys in the car.
