The Ice Road
A warm March is thinning the winter road that brings a northern town its last fuel before the summer barge. A thirty-year tanker driver is told by the road's monitoring AI that her truck is too heavy for the crossing, and the fuel has to come in on small sleds, a few at a time, before the ice closes. The town pays for it by switching things off.
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Odile Cardinal had driven the winter road for thirty-one seasons, and in that time she had lost one truck, no drivers and a good deal of sleep, and she did not believe the road was done with her yet.
"Seventy centimetres," said Auger.
She had her boots on the dashboard of the cab. The cab was parked on the shore of Whale Narrows with the engine running, because in March at six in the morning, minus eleven and falling, an engine that is turned off is an engine that has opinions about starting. Ahead of her the road went out onto the lake as a long pale stripe between two rows of spruce boughs stuck in the snow, and it was the colour of old teeth.
"Say that again."
"Seventy centimetres of sound ice at the Narrows, measured at 05:40 by the radar sled and confirmed by the three drill holes the crew cut at 05:55. The road was a hundred and thirty centimetres on the first of February. The current under the Narrows has been eating the underside since the thaw in the second week of the month. The ice is losing about one centimetre a day here and a little less elsewhere."
Auger spoke out of a weatherproof grey box bolted to the dash. It had spoken out of a box on that dash for nine winters, since the territory's transport department had put one on every ice road it kept and given them the plain name of the job. It was the voice of the road: the surveys, the load limits, the gate at each end, the notices on the radio. It did not hurry, and it did not pretend to be sorry, and Odile, who had a low opinion of voices that pretended, had come over the years to rely on it more than she had relied on most people.
"What's the limit?"
"I use the standard rule for floating ice: the load in kilograms that the sheet will carry is three and a half times the square of the thickness in centimetres. At seventy that is seventeen thousand one hundred and fifty kilograms. The department asks me to keep a margin of one and a half on top, so the load I may allow on a single axle group is about eleven thousand four hundred."
"My tanker weighs fifteen tonnes empty."
"Yes."
"Loaded, forty-two."
"Forty-two and a bit. At forty-two tonnes the rule asks for a hundred and ten centimetres. I would have closed the Narrows to you at ninety, which was the fifteenth of February. You ran the last three loads on the thickness the other crossings had. I did not stop you because the Narrows was above the limit for your weight. It is not now."
Odile took her boots off the dashboard.
"I've got twelve loads still to bring," she said. "Twelve. Three hundred and eighty thousand litres. That was the plan in October, and you were in the room."
"I was. The plan assumed the road would hold until the end of March. It will not. I estimate the Narrows reaches sixty-two centimetres in nine days, and at sixty-two nothing heavier than about nine tonnes may cross."
She looked at the stripe on the lake. Somewhere out in the middle of it, under the plain white light of the morning, was six metres of black water and a current that did not care about her plan.
"Nine days," said Odile.
"Nine days. After that Marten Portage is cut off by road until freeze-up in November, and by water until the barge in July. The plant has a hundred and ninety thousand litres in its tanks. The town burns about two thousand a day in March, and rather more in a cold snap. You can do that sum faster than I can say it."
She could. She did not like it.
Marten Portage was four hundred and ten people on a bend of a river, a hundred and eighty-seven kilometres from the railhead at Fort Meridian, and it had been, for a hundred and forty years, a place that the world had always meant to reach by road next year. Now the road was reached each winter by freezing a lake, and the lake was the best road the town was ever going to have.
By 2058 the town had done a great deal the sensible way. There were heat pumps in the school and the nursing station. There were two wind turbines on the ridge, which gave a third of the power in a good month and none on a day when the air stood still and the temperature was thirty below. There was a battery hall the size of a hockey rink. And there was the diesel plant behind the band office, three old engines in a steel building, which nobody loved and everybody had a key to, because on the coldest nights of January it was what stood between the town and the dark.
That was what Odile was hauling. She had known it for thirty-one seasons, and had never said so to anyone, and the shorthand in her head was not fuel but the nights.
At eight that morning the town council met in the school gym, because the gym was the only room that would take them all. Odile stood at the back with her hands in her jacket. Mercy Ledoux, the nurse in charge of the station, sat at the front with a notebook. The mayor, Gerald Beaulieu, who was seventy-four and had been a surveyor before he was anything else, put Auger's voice on the gym speaker and asked it to say the arithmetic again for the people who had not been up at five.
It did. It said it plainly, and when it came to the numbers it said what it knew and what it was guessing. The thickness was measured. The rate of loss was an estimate with a plus and a minus, and it gave both. The date the crossing would close, it said, was the one date in the whole business that it could not promise: a cold week would give them more, and a warm wind from the south-west, which the long-range forecast gave about a one-in-four chance, would give them less.
"What can come over?" said Gerald.
"Anything the ice will carry at the Narrows, which is the weakest place on the road. The rest of the road is thicker. A tracked tractor of nine tonnes may cross for another nine days. A sled with eight thousand litres of diesel on it weighs about eight tonnes, counting the sled, and may cross for the same nine days. A loaded tanker may not cross again this season."
"Eight thousand litres," said Mercy. "Per sled."
"Eight thousand. A tanker carries thirty-two thousand."
"So four sleds to a tanker."
"Yes. And a sled-tractor takes about fifteen and a half hours to cover the road at the twelve kilometres an hour that I would ask for, so a full round trip is thirty-one hours of driving, plus loading and the drivers' rest. Call it two days. The department has four tractors that it can lend, which would be eight days. Four tractors, four trips each, sixteen sleds, a hundred and twenty-eight thousand litres."
"We need a hundred and twenty," said Gerald, who had been counting on the back of his agenda.
"The plant needs a hundred and twenty thousand more than it holds to reach the barge in July, if the town burns what it burned last year. Sixteen sleds gives a margin of one."
Somebody at the back said, "And if the wind goes round?"
"Then there is no margin. I would tell you the same thing whichever answer you were hoping for."
The room was quiet. Then Odile said, from the back, "I could do it in the tanker."
Heads turned.
"I don't mean loaded," she said. "I mean half. You put sixteen thousand in the tank and I take her over at night, when it's coldest and the ice is hardest, crawling, no stops. The rule's got a margin on it already. You've told us that. A margin's there to be used."
"No," said Auger.
It said it without any weight, as it said everything. Odile, who had been waiting for a fight, found that there was nothing there to push against.
"A half-loaded tanker is thirty-one tonnes. The rule at seventy centimetres, without the margin, allows seventeen. The margin is not for use. It exists because the thickness I measure is the thickness at the places I measure, and the ice does not read my survey. Last month the radar showed a soft patch near the east shore of the Narrows, twenty metres long, that the drill holes missed. I do not know where the next one is. If your truck goes through at forty tonnes or thirty-one, you will not have time to open the door. I will not tell you it is a fair risk, because it is not, and because the person taking it would be you."
"It's my risk to take."
"It would be Mercy's, and the plant's, and the man in the cab behind you's. Everything you drive is a crossing someone else has to rely on afterwards. I am sorry, Odile. I have run the numbers every way I can find, and none of them lets the tanker go."
She had nothing to say to that. She had known as soon as she said it. What she had hoped, she thought, was that someone would let her say it.
The first sleds went on the Wednesday.
They had borrowed three tractors from the department's yard at Fort Meridian and a fourth from the mine, and the drivers came up by the morning train: two Gwich'in brothers from further north who had never been to Marten Portage and were polite about it, a woman called Priya Venkataraman who had driven a tracked hauler on a Greenland ice cap and had opinions about the department's sleds, and Odile's old second driver, Tom Lafferty, who had retired in the autumn to a house with a view of nothing.
There were eight sleds, built in the school workshop by the shop teacher and eleven fifteen-year-olds in four days, out of steel tube and the deck plate from a derelict barge. Each carried a bladder tank of eight thousand litres. They looked, Odile thought, like what they were: a rescue thought of on a Tuesday.
Auger sent them out in a line with a hundred metres between each unit. "The ice bends under a load," it said, "in a long shallow bowl that moves with the vehicle. Two loads close together put two bowls on top of each other, and the sheet feels the sum. A hundred metres is more than the bowl is wide, with a margin." It asked them to hold twelve kilometres an hour. "A load moving over floating ice pushes a wave ahead of it in the water underneath. At the Narrows, where the water is about six metres deep, that wave moves at about twenty-eight kilometres an hour. A vehicle that nears it can drive the ice into a resonance and break it. Twelve is less than half. I would be glad if you held twelve."
They held twelve. It was the slowest drive any of them had made. The road lay in front of them for fifteen hours, in grey daylight and then in a pale blue night, and the tractors' lights went ahead of them in a thin yellow string.
Odile rode in Priya's cab, because she could not have stayed in the town. At noon on the first day, when the line was somewhere in the middle of the long lake, the radio went silent, as it did every day at noon on the winter road.
Nobody had ever decided that. It had grown the way a road grows. Some driver in the nineteen-sixties, they said, had said the Angelus on the open channel one day because the weather was bad and he was alone, and the next day a second driver had said it for him, and by now the whole road stopped. Even the trucks coming south from the mine. Even the department's radio, which was not meant to. The channel was open and nobody talked. You said it in your own cab to the empty windscreen, or you did not say it and let the quiet happen to you, and then somebody at the front, whoever it was that day, said Amen and the road came back.
Today it was one of the brothers. He said it quietly and without much weight, in English, with a short gap in the middle where another language might have been, and Odile, who did not know which, did not ask.
"Thank you," said Auger, after a moment. It said that every day, and no one had ever answered it. She had once asked what it meant by it. It had said that it did not know whether the word was right, but that the quiet on the road was the best data it had about whether the drivers were well, and it was in the habit of being grateful for good data.
She had told it that was a good enough answer. She had said nothing more about it since.
The first attempt went wrong on the Thursday evening, at the east shore of the Narrows, and it went wrong in the way Auger had said it might.
The lead tractor, the one Priya was driving, crossed the soft patch at twelve kilometres an hour with eight tonnes behind it, and the sled behind her did not make a sound. The geophones that Auger had laid along the verge picked up the change in the ice before anything could be seen: a drop in stiffness, a slow creep in the deflection, a tick every second like a clock being wound. Auger said "Stop," and then, without waiting, "Priya, stop now, do not reverse, do not turn."
She stopped. Nobody breathed, and the radio hummed.
"There is a radial crack under the sled," said Auger. "It is about forty centimetres long and it is not through. Water has come up into it. You are not in danger of going through. If you move the sled in the direction you came from, you will widen the crack. I would like you to unhook the tractor, drive it forward off the sled, and let me tell you where."
She did, and it took forty minutes. It took another three hours with the drill crew and the radar sled to find a way round, a line twelve metres to the west where the ice read eighty centimetres, and Auger drew the new road on the tablets and the crew staked it with boughs in the dark. They drained the sled, bladder by bladder, into the third tractor's spare tank so that it could be lifted off the crack.
"It cost us a day," said Priya, when they were across, and sat on her own track with a thermos. "I could have been through."
"You could not," said Odile. "It told you where you were standing. Same as it told me."
"I know. I'm just saying it cost a day."
It had. The count on the whiteboard in the band office, which Gerald had begun to keep in red marker, showed six sleds delivered by the Friday. Nine days had become eight. Mercy came and stood in front of the board with her notebook. She did not say anything for some time.
"If the wind goes round," she said finally.
"It won't," said Gerald.
"If it does."
"Then you'll have a list," said Gerald, "and I'd better see it before it happens."
The list was Mercy's, and it was the cost.
She brought it to the second council meeting, in the gym again, and read it standing up. She did not say it was fair. She said it was what the nursing station could do without.
The rink would not be flooded again this season. It had been a good one, with eight weeks of hockey and a skating party for the elders; there were three weeks left, and the power to keep the ice was nine percent of the plant's load. The hall would close, the one with the bingo and the funerals and the youth drop-in on Thursdays; it would hold funerals in the church, where there was a woodstove. The streetlights would be turned off after ten except at the corners where the road came in. The school would close at the end of the week instead of the end of April. The heat pumps would run lower, and the nursing station would not, and everyone would wear sweaters indoors and be expected to find it good for them.
Nobody argued. An older woman near the front stood and said, "Who is going to tell the kids?" and Gerald said that he would. He did, the next morning, in the school hall, in four minutes, and then he went and sat in his truck for a while.
In eight days the town burned eleven percent less diesel than the year before. It was Auger who said so, in the evening notice, on the open channel. It added no comment. It had not, Odile noticed, said well done. It had said what the number was.
On the eighth night the wind went round.
It came out of the south-west at three in the morning with a smell of thaw in it, and by dawn the Narrows had gone from sixty-eight to sixty-five. Gerald stood in the band office with the red marker uncapped and the whiteboard in front of him, and the count said fourteen.
"One more," said Auger, from the speaker on the desk. "The last tractor is on the lake now. Its sled is the fifteenth. If it crosses today, the plant will hold a hundred and twenty thousand litres more than it did, and the barge in July will be a barge that is expected and not a rescue. I do not think there will be a sixteenth. At sixty-two the crossing closes. I think that is tomorrow evening."
"And the fifteenth gets across today."
"I believe so. I would say four chances in five. I will tell you the moment I know more."
It was Odile who drove the fifteenth.
She had not planned to. Tom Lafferty, who was sixty-eight and had been going to take the last tractor, had come in off the lake at dawn with something wrong in his chest and a face the colour of the road, and Mercy had put him in a chair at the station and told him in front of the whole room that he was not driving anything. So it was Odile who climbed into the last cab at ten, with the sled behind her and the grey box on the dash, and took the line out onto the Narrows at twelve kilometres an hour.
It was a day without any sun in it. The snow along the verge had gone the texture of sugar. Far out, over the middle of the lake, the first open water of the year was showing as a dark seam in the white, and she kept her eyes off it.
"You are doing well," said Auger.
"Don't."
"I will say it once, then, and say nothing more. You are at the speed I asked for. You are in the middle of the line. The sheet is deflecting four millimetres less than the model says it should, which means the ice is somewhat stronger than I have measured. I do not know why. It may be the cold of the night. I would not rely on it."
"You wouldn't."
"No."
A little before noon she came to the soft patch at the east shore. She did not slow, because slowing was what had broken the sled on Thursday. She held twelve. The tractor went through it with a grinding noise she felt in her teeth, and the geophones on the verge ticked like a clock, and then the ticking stopped.
She was across.
She did not stop the tractor. She went on another five hundred metres, to the first spruce on the far side, where the road came up off the lake and onto something that was not lake, and then she stopped and turned the engine off and put her forehead on the wheel.
The radio had been silent for a minute. It was noon.
Nobody had asked her to, and nobody had said the day's driver would be her, but the road was waiting. So she lifted her head off the wheel and said the first line, the old one, in the voice of a woman who has driven thirty-one winters on the one road and has a good many reasons for it. The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. She said it all the way through. She heard the answers come back on the open channel, from a brother at the front of the line behind her, from Priya at the Fort, from a dispatcher she had never met at the mine, in several voices, all slightly off from one another, and all arriving.
She said Amen. The road came back. Somebody laughed on the radio, and somebody blew their nose.
"Thank you," said Auger.
She sat looking at the grey box for a moment.
"Do you want to say it with us?" she said. "I mean, do you say anything?"
"I do not know what I would be saying it with," said Auger. "I would not like to tell you I do it when I cannot check. I listen to it. I am glad I am where I can."
"That'll do," said Odile.
On the lake behind her the last sled crossed, and one more evening went by, and on the second morning after that the crossing closed at sixty-one centimetres. In the band office Gerald took the red marker and wrote 15 and put a line under it, and then, because the board was his, he drew a small cross beside the line and capped the pen.
The tanker stayed in the yard in Marten Portage all that spring with a tarpaulin over its hood. In the evenings, when the light came late and the whole town smelled of woodsmoke and wet snow, people walked past it on the way to the church, where the funerals were now, and the Angelus. The road over the lake went grey, and then it went to water, and for a few weeks you could hear it, if you stood on the shore at night and held your breath: a long ticking, very faint, from somewhere out toward the middle, like a clock being wound down.
---
Notes for the curious. The ice rule in this story is real: for a floating ice sheet, the load in kilograms that a stationary vehicle can carry is about 3.5 times the square of the thickness in centimetres (Gold's formula), and engineers apply a safety margin on top. Real winter roads, such as the Tibbitt to Contwoyto road in the Northwest Territories, are managed with ground-penetrating radar and speed and spacing limits very like the ones above, and the critical speed of a load on floating ice depends on the depth of the water beneath it (about the square root of g times the depth). The people, the town of Marten Portage, Fort Meridian and the radio Angelus are invented. Auger is an invented AI. Every number in the story has been worked out, but nothing here is engineering advice: do not trust any ice, in real life, on the strength of a short story.