"As the weather grew warmer [the ice] was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away." - H. D. Thoreau, Walden, chapter 17 (Half a rod is 8.25 feet).

Photo by Amy Belding Brown

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