The photograph we could not print: Spring ice breakup on the Great Lake

The photograph arrived in our office Thursday morning on a memory card hand-delivered by Martin Hoekstra, who has lived on Tamarack Point Road for forty-one years and knows when to keep his camera ready.

It shows the exact moment the ice shelf broke free from the shoreline at Tamarack Point, sometime around 7:20 a.m. on March 18th. The image is sharp and properly exposed. The composition places the fracture line slightly off-center, running diagonally from the lower left corner toward the rocky outcrop that marks the property line between the Hoekstra place and the old Vanburen cottage.

In the foreground, perhaps fifteen feet from where Martin stood, you can see the edge of the shore ice — that dense, gray-white mass that forms each winter where the waves freeze mid-crash against the rocks. The ice is textured like wet concrete, ridged and uneven, with darker patches where lake water has welled up through stress cracks in the days prior.

The fracture itself runs clean and bright, a line of startling blue-white against the duller gray. It is perhaps four inches wide at the point nearest the camera, widening to eight or nine inches as it extends toward the background. Along the fracture, you can see the layered structure of the ice — the seasons of freezing and refreezing, the bands of trapped air and sediment, the annual record written in frozen water.

What the background shows

Beyond the fracture, the ice shelf extends another forty yards toward the open water of the Great Lake. The surface is rough, pocked with snow that has compressed and refrozen into patches of white against the gray. Near the center of the frame, a section of the shelf has already begun to tilt, the far edge lifting perhaps two degrees as the near edge settles. In an hour, Martin said, that entire section would be gone.

The horizon line is visible in the upper third of the photograph, and the sky above is that particular shade of white-gray that we get in March when the temperature hovers just above freezing and the clouds sit low. The light is flat and even, without shadows, the kind of light that makes distances hard to judge.

In the extreme upper right corner, you can just make out the roof of the Kettrick boathouse on the far side of Tamarack Point, perhaps half a mile away. The structure is dark against the pale sky, its outline softened by distance and the morning haze that rises when cold air meets warming water.

Why we cannot print it

The photograph was taken on a camera whose file format our current press system cannot process without conversion, and the conversion introduces artifacts that would misrepresent the clarity of Martin's original work. Rather than print a degraded version, we have chosen to describe what the photograph shows, so that readers may form their own sense of what that morning looked like at Tamarack Point.

Martin noted that the breakup this year occurred six days later than last year's, and eleven days later than the thirty-year average he has tracked in a spiral notebook he keeps on his kitchen counter. The ice shelf at Tamarack Point has broken free every spring since 1983, when the point was still called Tamarack Landing and the Kettrick boathouse was a fish-cleaning station operated by the Tamarack Township Marina Association.

The photograph of the coin telescope that we described in February has since been successfully printed in our March edition, available at the Wexagaw County Library and the Grebe Point General Store. We continue to work with our press technician on the file format issue.

Anyone wishing to view the ice breakup photograph may contact Martin Hoekstra through the township office. He has offered to show the image on his home computer to interested parties, by appointment, on weekday mornings.