July Ice
On the night of July 11th, Kittredge Reservoir froze over.
I’ll give you the facts first, since a lot of people have heard about it as a rumor, and I was there. It was the hottest week of the summer. It had been ninety-three degrees that afternoon in town and it was still in the seventies at ten at night. A little after eleven, people on the north shore started posting on the town page about a sound coming off the water, a long groaning crack, like a ship’s hull. By midnight the reservoir was white from the dam to the inlet, six miles, and the ice was thick enough to stand on. By the time I got down to the boat launch with my grandmother, there were two hundred people out on it.
I was sixteen. My grandmother, Ilse, was eighty-nine. She’d heard the sound from her bedroom and called me and said, “Take me to the water,” in a voice I had never heard her use.
You need to understand about the reservoir. The town I grew up in, Kittredge, Montana, is the new town. The old one is under the water. In 1952 the federal government built a dam on the Teal River and flooded the valley behind it, and the old town of Kittredge, about three hundred people, a main street, a church, a grange hall, the school, was moved up the hill to where it is now, or most of it was. The buildings that couldn’t be moved were left. On calm days in a dry year, if you take a boat out past the point, you can look down and see the top of the church steeple sixty feet below, green with weed.
My grandmother was twelve when they moved. Her parents didn’t come with her.
That’s all she’d ever said about it. They didn’t come. She’d lived with an aunt in the new town and grown up and married and buried my grandfather and lived eighty years in a house where she could see the reservoir from her kitchen window. She never went out on it. Not in a boat, not in winter on the ice. She’d sit on the shore at the boat launch sometimes, on summer evenings, with a thermos.
I helped her down the ramp onto the ice. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever felt. The night was hot. The air smelled like cut grass and dust. And underfoot, the ice was cold and solid and very clear. Black ice, the kind you get when water freezes fast and still. You could see down into it like glass.
And below it, the lights were on.
I don’t know how else to say it. Sixty feet down, at the bottom of the reservoir, there was a town, and it was lit. Streetlights. Porch lights. Lit windows, yellow and soft. A long straight main street, with the lights running down it in a line, and the shape of the church at the end, and its steeple pointing up at us, and its windows glowing.
Everyone was looking. Two hundred people, standing on the ice in shorts and flip-flops, in the heat, looking down. Some had flashlights. Nobody was talking much. A little kid was crying and his dad was holding him up so he could see.
My grandmother made a sound beside me. She got down on her knees on the ice, which she should not have been able to do with her hips, and put both her hands flat on it.
There were people down there.
You could see them, once your eyes adjusted. They were small at first, far down. People on the main street. People on the porches. They were walking slowly, the way people walk on a summer evening. Some were standing still. And as we watched, all of them, all at once, turned their faces up.
They’d seen us. Our lights. Our shapes against the stars, I suppose, from where they were.
Then they started coming up.
Not swimming. I don’t think they were in water, exactly, any more than we were in air. They rose, slowly, the way you’d rise in a dream, standing upright, their arms at their sides. Men in work shirts and women in house dresses. Kids in overalls. An old man in a suit. They came up through the dark toward the underside of the ice, and the closer they got, the clearer they were, until they were right there, an inch below the ice, pressed against it, looking up at us. Each of them under someone. As though they’d each picked one.
The woman under me was young, maybe thirty. She had pale hair pinned up and a cotton dress with little flowers on it. She was looking up at me with a puzzled, friendly expression, the way you’d look at someone you think you might have met at a church picnic.
Under my grandmother, there were two of them. A man and a woman, side by side. The woman had my grandmother’s chin. My grandmother was making a low steady sound and pressing her hands on the ice.
Then the writing started.
It was the old man in the suit first, near the boat launch, under the mayor, of all people. He lifted one hand and, on the underside of the ice, with one finger, he wrote. The letters came out backward to us, the way writing on a window looks from the other side, in a clean clear line where his finger melted the frost. People read it aloud.
IS IT OVER
The mayor didn’t know what to say. Somebody behind him said, “Is what over?” and somebody else said, “They can’t hear you, write it,” and a teenager ran to his truck and came back with a can of spray paint, which is the kind of thing that happens in a small town, and the mayor sprayed on the ice in big orange letters: IS WHAT OVER.
The old man looked at it for a long time. Then he wrote: THE FLOOD
That’s when people started understanding. It went through the crowd like wind through grass. Some of the old-timers knew the stories. Not everyone left in 1952. The government said they’d all been relocated, and most were. But there were a few families who wouldn’t go. Who said the water would never come that high, or that they’d rather go with their houses, or who just didn’t believe it. The dam gates closed on a July night. The water came up through the valley in about three days.
They’d been waiting down there for seventy-four years for someone to tell them it was safe to come up.
All over the ice, they were writing now. IS IT OVER. WHERE IS EVERYONE. HOW LONG. CAN WE COME UP. The woman under me wrote, very carefully, WHAT YEAR, and I didn’t know how to answer, so I took the spray can when it came around and wrote 2026 and watched her read it, backward, and put her hand over her mouth.
The man under my grandmother didn’t write anything. He just looked at her. The woman beside him wrote, slowly, under my grandmother’s hands, ILSE?
My grandmother said, “Yes. Mama. Yes.”
And then she took the spray can out of my hand.
I want to be careful how I tell this part, because a lot of people in town have their own version, and they argue about it.
My grandmother wrote one word on the ice, in front of her parents’ faces. She wrote it backward, so they could read it. She must have planned it. She must have been planning it for seventy-four years.
NOW
And all across the reservoir, the ice began to crack.
Not breaking. Not yet. Just a sound like a long sigh, everywhere at once, and fine white lines running out across the black like veins. The people under the ice were pressing up on it with their hands. All of them. All together. And it was getting warm. You could feel it through your shoes.
People ran. I don’t blame them. Two hundred people running across ice toward the boat launch in the dark with their flashlights swinging, kids screaming, somebody’s dog barking. I grabbed my grandmother under the arms. She fought me. She was eighty-nine and she fought me like a wildcat, and I picked her up off the ice and carried her to the shore, crying, while the cracks ran out under my feet.
The ice went out at 4:12 in the morning, according to the time stamp on someone’s video. All at once, with a long rushing sound. By sunrise it was a reservoir again, flat and blue, the water a little warmer than usual for July.
There were wet footprints the next morning.
On the boat ramp, and up the gravel path from the launch, and onto the sidewalks of the new town, bare footprints and shoe prints, dark on the dry concrete, already fading in the heat. Dozens of them. They went up the hill, along the streets, to the doors of the oldest houses in town. The houses the old families moved into in 1952. They stopped at the doorsteps.
Then they turned around. Every set. They went back down the hill and down the boat ramp and into the water.
Most of them went back the way they came. Two sets, a man’s and a woman’s, went to my grandmother’s door. And three sets came back out of it, down to the water. The third set was small, and bare, and the toes were pointed in a little, the way a girl walks.
My grandmother’s bed was empty in the morning. The search went on for a week. They dragged the reservoir by the boat launch. They didn’t find anything.
My mother doesn’t talk about it. She’s put the house up for sale.
I still live in Kittredge. On calm evenings I go down to the boat launch with a thermos, the way my grandmother used to, and sit on the shore and look out at the water past the point.
Last week, on the hottest night of August, in the long blue dusk, I saw lights out there, under the water. Faint. Just a few. Porch lights, I think. A line of streetlights down a main street.
And I’m almost sure, at the end of the street, the church windows were lit.