“Look outside!”

It seemed such an absurd order; Travis Lindsay could not yet see inside, let alone look out. His eyes were still sticky with sleep, his mind in another world. His own voice seemed like it belonged to some dimwitted creature, not even human, as he tried to speak into the cordless phone.

“Whuh?”

“Look outside!” Nish shouted again at the other end, loud enough this time that Travis’s mother, still standing by the bed after handing her son the telephone, heard and answered for him.

“He’s awake, Nish!” she called out towards the receiver. Travis blinked upwards. His mother was laughing at him as he struggled to surface from a deep, deep sleep.

“Nish is right,” Mrs. Lindsay said to Travis. “Get up and have a look.”

Travis rubbed his eyes. He checked the clock radio: 7:03 a.m. Too early even for school. And it was Saturday, wasn’t it? What was Nish up to?

“He’s moving, Nish!” Mrs. Lindsay called towards the receiver.

Travis set the phone down on his pillow and pushed back his covers. He instantly wished he could dive straight back under them, burrowing into their warmth and slipping back into the magnificent sleep that had just been stolen from him. He fought off the urge and struggled to his feet, stretching and yawning hard as his mother, still laughing, stepped back to let him pass. Behind her, Travis could see his father standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hand. He was trying to blow onto the steaming cup, but he couldn’t purse his lips properly. He was laughing too. What on earth could be so funny about looking outside?

Travis scratched his side and chewed on the stale taste of sleep as he all but staggered towards the window. His mother reached out in front of him, yanking the heavy curtains back.

Travis reacted as if he’d just been blindsided by a hard check. The window seemed to explode with light, like a million flash-bulbs firing at once.

He stepped back, his hands over his eyes. In the background he could hear Nish’s voice squeaking like a mouse as he continued to shout over the telephone, which lay, completely ignored, on Travis’s pillow.

Travis rubbed his eyes hard, the light still flashing red and yellow and orange in the front of his brain. He rubbed and waited, peeking first through his fingers as he approached the window again. It was still too bright, the light like blinding needles, but slowly his eyes adjusted. Still squinting, he moved closer to the window, the glass quickly fogging with his breath, then clearing as he stood back slightly.

The world had turned to glass!

Travis looked out over the backyard, out past Sarah Cuthbertson’s big house on the hill, and off towards the river and the lookout that sat high over the town of Tamarack. Glass! Glass everywhere: shining, sparkling, silver down along the river, golden along the tip of Lookout Hill where the sun was just cresting, hard steel along the streets of the town that lay still shaded for the moment by the hills to the east.

The window was fogging up again. Travis pressed a fist against the cold glass, circling to clear the window. The condensation clung to his skin, cold and wet and tickling.

He blinked again. The sight reminded Travis of a counter at the jewellery store owned by Fahd’s uncle, diamonds shimmering under bright lights, expensive crystal glittering on glass displays.

A town truck was moving down River Street, heading for the road up towards the lookout. The truck was spreading a shower of sand, the silver road turning brown as the truck crept slowly along. But at the turn for the bridge and the hill, the truck kept sliding down River Street, the wheels spinning uselessly, the big vehicle turning, slowly, like a large boat, until eventually it crunched sideways into an ice-covered snowbank.

Travis could see children outside a home on King Street. They were stepping as if they were walking on a tightrope rather than a wide street. One went down, smack on his back, and slid helplessly. The other youngster leapt after the first one, spinning wildly.

There was an urgent squeak at Travis’s ear.

“Ya see it?”

Travis turned quickly, almost jumping. His mother was holding the phone out for him. He had forgotten all about Nish!

Travis took the phone. “Neat!”

“Whatdya mean, ‘neat’?” Nish’s voice now barked clearly over the telephone. “It’s awesome! It’s amazing! It’s unbelievable! C’mon–we gotta get out on it. Grab your skates!”

Nish didn’t even wait for an answer. He slammed his own phone down so hard Travis winced.

Grab your skates? It looked more like Travis should be grabbing a rope and a bucket of sand–perhaps even his father’s spike-soled golf shoes–to walk on that. But he saw Nish’s point: Tamarack had turned into the world’s largest skating rink.

“It’s called verglas,” said Mr. Lindsay after Travis had handed his mother back the cordless phone. “At least that’s what my friend Doug’s grandfather called it. He was an old Scot, and he said he’d seen it only three times in his life. This is the second time for me.”

“What is it?” Travis asked. He was back at the window, clearing a porthole with the side of his fist.

“You have to have a deep thaw followed immediately by a deep freeze–and no snow in between. It’s a freak of nature. Beautiful–but dangerous.”

Travis looked out and thought about the last week. Tamarack had seen record snowfalls through January–the snow was piled so high along the streets that pedestrians stumbling along the sidewalks couldn’t see the cars passing alongside them. But then, on the first of February, a south wind came in, bringing record-high temperatures. Nish had even turned up for hockey practice in shorts and sunglasses.

Then it had rained. Not enough to melt the snow, but enough to turn the streets to ponds. And just last night the winds had suddenly shifted, and a bitter cold front had moved in from the north. The thermometer outside the kitchen window had fallen so fast it seemed to have sprung a leak. The cold was so deep that twice during the evening the Lindsays had gone to the window when maple trees in the backyard had cracked like rifle fire.

“That’s what Old Man Gibson called it,” said Mr. Lindsay. “Verglas. It don’t know what it means. Gaelic for something to do with ‘glass,’ I suppose. You can see why.”

“How long did it last?” asked Mrs. Lindsay.

“Only a couple of days. But if I had to pick two winter days out of my childhood I’d never want to forget, I’d probably take those two. Maybe because they closed the schools down and no one could even get to work.”

“They closed the schools?” asked Travis.

“It’s Saturday,” said Travis’s mother, crushing his hopes.

Mr. Lindsay went on, lost in his own memories: “They put chains over their car tires back then. That was before they sanded the roads. The chains would bite into the ice so they could get a grip. We used to grab onto the back bumpers of the cars and they’d drag us on our rubber boots up and down the streets.”

“Charles!” Mrs. Lindsay said abruptly.

But Mr. Lindsay was laughing, enjoying a sweet memory. “We called it ‘hitching.’ It was kind of like waterskiing, except it was winter, and we were being pulled around by cars, not motorboats.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” said Mrs. Lindsay.

“I guess,” Mr. Lindsay answered slowly. “But cars went a lot slower back then, and there weren’t as many on the road.”

“Still!” she said.

“You’re right. I wouldn’t recommend it now. But you kids should get out there and skate on it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

“You’ve seen it twice,” Travis corrected.

“Yes,” his father said. “But I was only young once.”

Mr. Lindsay went to the window. He was smiling, but it seemed to Travis a sad smile. Then his father turned, slapping his hands together to break the spell.

“You’d better get dressed, young man.”

Travis looked out in the direction his father had been gazing. A thick-set young man in a blue Screech Owls jacket and cap was churning full force around the corner, his skates digging deep where normally there would have been pavement.

The young skater kicked out suddenly and flew through the air–like a wrestler going for the throat–until he slammed, side down and laughing, onto the slope of the road. The ice offered no resistance, and followed by his stick, gloves, and hat, the youngster came spinning and sliding like a fat hockey puck straight towards the Lindsay driveway.

It was Nish, coming to call.