I

I was almost elated to discover the pipes had frozen, just as I was almost elated the moment I realized I was in a car crash or the time I thought the cop who had pulled me over would bust me. The thing I had been warned about and imagined and feared was finally happening. Experience was freeing me from worry with disaster.

My grandmother waited forty winters for these very pipes to freeze. She always warned about how easily it could happen, how the plumbing could betray. The pipes had to be drained and the water shut off before the first frost. The ancient, toothless German plumber had to be called to come and do it. But a prospective buyer wanted to check the faucets, and so the water was left on and so here they were, as promised, the frozen pipes, burst and spurting into the subzero night.

II

I started coming up to the country house again when my grandparents stopped, to get out of the city and be alone. The house was on the market but the market had tanked. As long as the house didn’t sell I could come up whenever I wanted and skulk around its purgatory, neither its owner nor its rightful heir.

It was an innocuous enough midcentury bungalow barely an hour from New York City, but surprisingly remote. It sat at the end of a long dirt road, down a rotting set of stairs, overlooking a small lake and surrounded by trees. There were other houses by the lake but they were mostly empty in the winter.

The house had a basement, and the basement had cavernous depths. To unlock the door to the upstairs, you had to first take the key from under the mat outside the basement door, itself in complete shadow in daylight and pitch blackness at night, and then unlock the basement and reach into the low beams overhead for the key on the rusted nail.

After finding the key and dashing up the stairs, I’d go through the house turning on all the lights, opening the doors to the two musty bedrooms, reaching into cabinets hoping for another overlooked bottle of Dom Perignon but finding only paper plates and Progresso cans. Outside, in the winter wind, dry leaves swirled, screens rattled, doors banged, branches tapped, hinges rasped and the dark night fell as it had for centuries on dense woods that harbored weird stone sheds, rusting machinery, mossy tombstones, spooky stuff.

My grandmother marveled that I came up here by myself. She said she could never have done it, even if she’d wanted to, because she would have been be too scared to sleep in the house alone. Then a married friend came up for the day and remarked that she, too, thought that the house was much too scary a place to sleep alone.

I wondered if I’d learned to sleep alone in scary places because I did not always have a man to keep me company, or if I did not always have a man to keep me company because I was not compelled by necessity to have one to avoid sleeping in scary places alone. I wondered if this had been the right path, the one that led me down this dark dirt road to this lonely old house, to face its silent nights, scary noises, frosts and floods alone.

My punk rock hero and confidant has his own advice column in which he addresses the worries of teenaged punks. A brokenhearted once kid wrote in to ask him what was the point of love and relationships, since they could cause so much trouble and pain. “Why bother?” he asked.

To which my punk rock hero and confidant replied, “To form a united front against the cold bulwark of each lonely night.”

III

The very last time I go, on the very last weekend of the decade, I arrive via L train under the East River, 4 train up the East Side, Metro-North train up the Hudson and a long taxi ride down the dirt road.

There is a hidden turn barely visible between the trees, and then I have to coax the driver up the steep hill to the house. The dirt road noses up over the hill and comes down and there is a little parking lot overlooking the lake and it is here at the end of the road where I get dropped off.

One driver who brought me once used his GPS and watched the flat picture on the screen instead of the road ahead, and another was a lady cabbie who kept rolling her eyes and saying “Ay,” every time we went over a bump. The time the pipes freeze my driver is a Rastafarian who drives slowly but calmly down the entirety of the dirt road, and doesn’t say a word until we get to the end.

“This is the boonies,” says the Rastafarian taxi driver. He drives off chuckling, “Enjoy the boonies.”

IV

Now the wind whistles on the frozen lake. The house creaks and I could be scared of the noises but being alone in a creaky house surrounded by darkness has taught me something about fear.

The fear, I learned by coming up here and sleeping alone, is a choice. I hear the noises and the dark shadow rises up, implying all the psycho-killers and mythic demons, those movies I’ve seen only in preview, with the people in the masks. The taxi slips off into the night and I am all alone in this empty house by the frozen lake, and maybe the people in the house across the field are there and maybe they are not, and maybe someone would hear me if I screamed but in all likelihood they would not, and the telephone is disconnected and my cell phone only has one flickering bar of reception only about half the time, and I could be scared of the noises, or I could be scared to sleep alone, but then I could not go wherever I want to whenever I want to and do whatever I want.

So I hear a creak or a thud or a whistle of wind and I jump and I think “What was that?” and I allow myself to imagine all the worst things, the men with the knives and the people with the masks, and I wait for them to appear and when they don’t I cognitively train myself. I feel the fear at its most acute and I notice where it comes from, which is not outside of me but inside of me. When the man with the knife or the cretin in the mask does not appear I force myself to admit that the sound, while it inspires the thought of the man with the knife, does not conjure the man with the knife. Over time, I begin to understand that the demons are only in my imagination, and I decide not to fear the sound that causes me to imagine the man with the knife, only, should he ever even bother to appear, the man with knife.

V

My family rarely came up here in the winter, only a few times. Once we came up and the lake was frozen and it was lightly snowing. My dad took a wide broom and swept a clean oval for us to skate on and we all skated together, first in the path he cleared and then all over the lake. I’d never skated anywhere before but a crowded indoor rink. The sky was the gray-white of a snowing sky and the snow was white and the ice he cleared was a translucent silver gray and our skate blades made curving white lines and I raced my brother from one end of the lake to the other and eventually it got dark and we kept skating even when it was dark. My mom’s coat that winter was pale green and her scarf was red with yellow stripes and we were all very fast and good skaters.

VI

Now the lake was frozen again and the pipes were frozen for the first time, because just once, just once, the water was left on. It was only once! It was one of those moments that proved that once was enough.

Until I saw the water streaming from the bathroom ceiling I never made the connection between the pipes in the house and the plumbing, as it is sometimes crudely called, inside human beings, and my grandmother’s obsession with the calamities of plumbing in bodies and houses alike. She was always warning me about the pipes freezing and about getting knocked up, how it could just happen, it could just happen.

I shut off the valve that sent the water to the downstairs bathroom and started mopping it up before it could freeze on the floor. It was so very cold in the bathroom. The water in the toilet had frozen solid. I found this oddly comforting. I had spent the whole week slogging through a New Yorker article about the effects of disappearing Antarctic glaciers on penguins and here was a bathroom full of ice. There was very little connection between a frozen toilet in upstate New York and pieces of glaciers the size of Connecticut slipping into polar seas, but the sight of the ice gave me hope. It has not all melted! It’s not over yet!

VII

The ancient, toothless German plumber who put the plumbing in this house forty years ago, who came each winter to shut off the water so the pipes he himself plumbed would not burst, whose phone number was not penciled on a scrap of paper but inked in the long-disintegrated vinyl address book, whose name I had heard but whose face I had never seen–he was the only one to call.

“Call Mr. Piehler,” came the word from civilization. My grandmother, now recently and finally widowed and deteriorating rapidly, was too frail for this information. After forty years of vigilant watch the very disaster she had predicted, warned about, feared and tried to prevent was upon us. From my millenial telephone that was also a camera, a stereo and a handheld computer, I called a phone with wires. A voice answered, heavily accented, from the depths of the twentieth century.

The man who came the next day was extremely short, weathered, stubby and strong. With excruciating slowness he knelt before the toilet, cracked the ice with his fingers. I recoiled, then remembered the fluids, the sewage a plumber as old as this one must have touched in the course of his working life. He gestured at the pipes and fixtures and tiles and plaster he’d have to pry away and replace. “Same color,” he creaked, “maybe not perfect match, but behind the toilet, no one sees.” I agreed to everything as if I were paying the bill.

And so for the next two days, I am no longer alone in the house. There is not a monster or a demon or a cretin downstairs, but a little gnome, kind and friendly, in blue coveralls, declining my offerings of tea.

VIII

On New Year’s Eve I awaken at dawn and sit straight up to look out at the trees and moon. I fall back on the pillow and when I wake up again a lot of snow has fallen in just a few hours, maybe a foot. I meant to leave early to go back to the city but the taxi won’t come pick me up and I hear many trains whistle by while I wait for the snow to stop falling. I go over to the neighbors’ house to ask about a ride but when the mother of the family answers the door she says, “Do you want to go skating?” and holds out a pair of Christmas-gift ice skates and I forget about the ride and take the skates down to the lake.

I look for a place to sit down and put on the skates, but with all the fresh snow I can’t see where the lake begins and I step onto the ice without realizing it. In the moment that my feet fly up I feel, via its absence, what friction is. Gravity holds us on the earth but friction holds objects to one another.

I am airborne for a moment before I fall flat. I lie there splayed and wind-knocked and flail cartoonishly and make a messy snow angel.

I put on the skates and stand up, holding on to a tree. Then I let go and push off. I do not take any practice strokes or tentative shuffles. I just take off and I am going so fast.

I skate and skate and skate until I’ve made tracks all around the lake. My tracks are the only tracks and this feels like the greatest gift, this empty white expanse of ice and snow all my own.

I perform a New Year’s Eve ritual. I tell myself the story of the decade, one revolution of the ice per revolution of the sun. I skate around naming the events, personal and global, of each year. I time it so that each time I come around the apogee of my orbit it is June, and as I whiz past the tree where I started a new year begins.

In the midst of my decade revolutions I hear the ice poinging and boinging, creaking and groaning. It booms. It makes synthesizer theramin sounds. Is this normal? Or is it going to crack or break? If I fell in, could I swim, with my clothes and skates on, or would I quickly go numb and under?

I don’t care. If the ice swallows me right now I will die happy. I will glide out of existence while it is still 2009, on the 3652^nd and last day of the decade, and be literally frozen here, never knowing the tens, the teens. I will slip free of time and my last moments will be fearless ones.