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“You don’t have to worry about me. I could walk a bit,” Cage clarified.
“You sure?” Titus asked doubtfully.
“I don’t think I could do a two-mile hike, but we could go further than we have.”
“Alright then. Let’s get to it,” Titus said restarting his truck.
Titus drove for another twenty minutes and then parked the truck by the side of the road.
“How far is the hike?” I asked him.
“About a half a mile. Maybe a little less.”
“Are you sure you’re up for this? We don’t have to,” I said checking in with Cage.
“I’m fine. Really.”
I didn’t want to tell Cage he couldn’t or shouldn’t do it if he said he was fine. I had a hard time believing that someone who had an injury like his could hike a half-mile on it. That seemed crazy. But I had to trust Cage. No one knew how he felt except him.
The hike to the river was a snowy wonderland. We got quite a bit of snow in New York and Central Park was always nice in the winter. But I had never seen anything like this.
The deeper we got into the woods, the more snow-covered the trees became. It was beautiful. I hadn’t imagined that places like this existed in real life.
The only sound I heard was the crunch of the snow under our feet. Past that, there was a light whirring as the breeze cut through the trees. It had to be one of the most relaxing experiences ever. I didn’t know life could be so peaceful.
With Titus leading, I continuously looked back at Cage to see how he was doing. He seemed fine just as he said he would be. I wasn’t sure how. I’m sure it helped that there were no hills or uneven areas. But even with that, I was amazed by Cage. I knew that there was no way I could do what he was doing. It made me want to be with him even more.
“This is it,” Titus said leading us into a clearing.
I looked at the sight ahead of us. Forty feet away was a frozen lake that was a hundred feet across. At the far end was a thirty-foot high rock face. Stretching from the top to the bottom of it were icicles. It looked like a curtain made of ice. It was incredible.
“Wow!” I said unable to wrap my mind around the beauty of it.
“This is amazing,” Cage said as blown away by it as I was.
“Come on. Let me show you something,” Titus said ushering us forward.
Titus approached the edge of the frozen lake with us in tow.
“Is this safe?” I asked never having walked on ice before.
“Sure is. This has been frozen for the season. What you have to look out for is grey ice. When it’s blue it’s solid. When it’s snow-covered like this, you have to be careful, but for the most part, you’re fine.”
It reassured me that Titus knew so much about frozen lakes. It was probably something every kid growing up here knew. I couldn’t imagine all of the ways his upbringing was different than mine. Was Cage’s upbringing more similar to Titus’s?
All I knew about Cage when I met and fell for him, was that he was a football star. Because of my uncle and the parents at my high school, I was very comfortable with professional athletes. But Cage was more than that. He was a guy who grew up in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees and with a father who treated him like the only thing he was good for was football. That couldn’t be further from my experiences.
Of course, whose life could have been similar to mine? I guess the other kids at my school might have experienced something close. But could I only have a happy life with one of a handful of people, most of which were a generation younger than me?
That didn’t seem right to me. So, if not them, why not a guy who came from a completely different world, like Cage?
I looked back at Cage seeing if he disagreed with Titus’s assessment of the ice. When he didn’t react, I took what Titus said as fact. I followed Titus’s footsteps onto the ice and within a few feet, he looked back and corrected me.
“You never want to walk in a line on ice. Spread out. It reduces risk,” he said.
I didn’t see the logic in that, but I listened and stepped out of his cleared path. To me, Titus having walked on it was proof that the spot was strong enough to hold us. But, he grew up here while I spent my winters on a tropical island. What did I know?
The further we got across the lake, the more I realized that the ice curtain in front of us wasn’t a wall. It was a group of staggered icicles that appeared from a distance to be one piece. More amazing than that was the cave that was hidden behind it.
