1. The Bay Ice Story
Late February, 1954
St. Peter’s Bay, Prince Edward Island
I am stirring the milk into my morning tea as I stand before the big bay window in the living room. Frost has crept into the corners of the smallish panes. The sun is brilliant. Yesterday’s blizzard is a fleeting thought. The screeching forlorn cry of an occasional gull violates the quiet. Not a sprig of greenery is in sight; everything is white, except for the reckless slate grey rocks that push through the snow at the water’s edge. They seem to stab at the sky in triumph.
High winds have randomly denuded the icy surface of the bay. Blue-green patches stand out against the mounds, drifts, and pockets of snow. The sunlight picks up rainbows in the ice crystals as they blow across the frozen desert.
“This is good news for my paperwork,” pops into my mind.
Maternities, coroner’s inquests, and a slew of children’s ailments have kept me going until eleven o’clock at night for the past week. “I hope there aren’t any emergencies, because I won’t be able to get to them.” As the last sip of tea sloshes across my tongue, I head for the office just beyond the living room.
A sheet of paper stands at alert in my typewriter. I am hammering out a supply order to Anglo Canadian Drug Company: blood pressure pills, cough syrups, and stomach medicines. Striking the “n” key, I’m dumbfounded by the sound I least expected: the doorbell.
“How in the hell could anyone get through the drifts on these roads?” I mutter, crossing the hallway. “Must be a neighbour….”
A husky man is standing out front. His face is barely visible beneath a hooded wool coat and the thick grey scarf he’s stretched tightly across his face. He yanks on it to speak and I recognize Ian McNeil from across the bay.
“You can say no if you wish, and I wouldn’t blame you,” he begins haltingly. “But my wife is bleeding badly….” His eyes search mine and hope overcomes timidity. The fact that I’m the only doctor for twenty miles has something to do with it. Finally, he blurts out: “Could you come?”
“How did you possibly get here?” I ask, measuring each word.
“We crossed the ice in a car.”
“Well, if you’re crazy enough to do that, I’m crazy enough to go back with you.” I grab my medical case and load it up with intravenous fluids, IV tubing, syringes, needles, plasma expanders1, and pitocin.2 I climb into my down-filled flight suit, pull down the ear-lugs on my Russian hat, lace up my heavy fur-lined boots, and slide on my fleece-lined gloves. In the kitchen I tell my wife, “Helen, there’s a woman hemorrhaging in Greenwich and I’m going there…across the ice.” I step outside.
Snow blinded and wind-whipped, I follow Ian across the buried lawn. The wedge-shaped bay draws to a point at St. Peter’s River, about a half mile from the house. Straight across the bay it’s just one mile, but it’s six miles to Greenwich. As we tromp through the drifts, I’m thinking of the Midgell and Morell rivers. The flowing water melts the ice where they empty into the bay, and then the surface freezes over, making the ice only inches thick. But we won’t be able to recognize these deathtraps because of the drifts.
I stop dead on the other side of the railroad tracks. There, at the bay’s edge, is a black sedan with its front doors wide open. A heavy sisal rope crosses the windshield and disappears in double knots on the two window frames. “This is not a routine car ride,” I remark dryly. Farther out on the ice is a dark blue pickup truck. A twenty-foot aluminum extension ladder is tied to the hood.
“What’s that for?” I cry. My host clears his throat. He’s probably wondering if I’m turning chicken.
“Can’t be too sure about the ice,” he says softly.
With a sinking feeling in my stomach I climb onto the passenger seat. I’m thinking that the woman may lose her life if she continues to hemorrhage, and my jaws tighten. Suddenly I recall a French play I read in college: No Exit. The title takes on a new meaning.
“We didn’t have any problem on the way over,” says Ian, a little too enthusiastically. “But we might as well leave the doors open on the way back. You never know.”
Our take-off imprints a semi-circle into the ice’s edge, and we begin to make our way cautiously across the bay, the pickup trailing us by a good hundred yards. “No good having him too close if we go through” is my not-so-comforting thought as I look back at our potential saviour. Even with the frigid wind raging inside the car, the sound of the ice crackling under the tires is all I notice.
I know Ian is following the same safe path he took on the way over, but my heart’s not convinced—it’s in my mouth. We do, in fact, miss the weak spots.
Ian pulls up to the shoreline and parks. Shore grasses poke out of snowdrifts on either side of the trail winding up to Ian’s farmhouse. His wife, as it turns out, is having a miscarriage and losing lots of blood. I give her medication and put ice packs on her abdomen. This slows down the bleeding and gets her out of danger. Now she’s at the mercy of the snowplows; she’ll go to hospital as soon as they open the roads.
I charge five dollars for the house call and a dollar for medication. Ian and I fortify ourselves with mugs of hot tea and homemade strawberry jam on white bread, and then we step outside. From a distance the car, with its roped-open doors, looks like a waiting bird of prey. We inch our way onto the bay highway. The faithful pickup bird-dogs us from a distance. This time, entrusting my life to the mercy of frozen water doesn’t seem quite so absurd…seven on a scale of one to ten.
Back at the house, we shake hands. Ian doesn’t say much; his eyes do. Inside, I tell Helen what happened, peel off my outer clothes, and sit back down at the typewriter. After counting my blessings, I take out the half-finished supply order and insert a fresh piece of paper to write the bay ice story.
NOTES
1. Plasma expander: A fluid that fills up the veins with substitute plasma to prevent the patient from going into shock.
2. Pitocin: A drug that causes the uterus to contract.