It was two weeks ago that grandson Bob called to tell me something about our farm pond, but his words made no sense.

“What do you mean, ‘collapsed’?” I said.

“The ice collapsed. It’s laying on the bottom of the pond.”

“What happened to the water?”

“I don’t know. Gone.”

When I got there I saw the pond had become a giant bowl of ice, and Bob was ice skating around on the bottom of it. Fissures showed around the edges and through the center of the upper pond where it was shallow, but a large area of thick ice in the center, thickest we have ever seen, had lain down intact and in fact had deformed around the sides, giving an upward curve to the edges of the bowl. Ice can do things like that.

It had become an ice skateboard park. Bob was trying tricks and having, he said later, the most fun he ever had on skates.

I would have liked to go down with him, but wasn’t sure I could get out, despite the thin rope which Bob wisely had tied to a landward post of the pier as a fail-safe. Any attempt to walk down would have ended with me on my butt, sliding gracelessly to the bottom.

The pier which extends 25 feet out showed some damage. The pier’s dogleg walkway was askew, while the main walkway remained intact and in fact held a 10-foot rectangle of ice under its belly, looking like some gigantic, leggy insect carrying a crystal egg case. I took pictures.

We knew the ice was abnormally thick, but there was the proof, 10 or 11 inches thick, suspended in midair under the pier at the former water level of the pond. Our experience has been that four or so days of continuous hard freezer creates two and maybe three inches of good ice, plenty thick for ice skating. This winter’s stretch of many days in which the temperature failed to get above freezing was reported the longest here since 1979.

Son Seed and his boys Bob and The Favorite, along with their cousins Lamppost Head and The 747 and assorted friends, had been making good use of the ice the three days previous. They had cleared off enough of a 12-inch snowfall to make a hockey rink, complete with netted goals and the portable sideboards Seed fabricated a few years ago. Fortunately they had moved all that from the ice as a precaution because of a predicted warming trend.

As to what caused the pond to empty itself of water, the prevailing theory is that the ice crushed the standpipe of a four-inch pvc drain. I had installed it when we cleaned out the pond 30 years ago, the same time I built the pier. That does not, however, explain how the water level got low enough for the heavy ice to contact the standpipe, the top of which was several feet below normal water level. Perhaps last summer’s drought played a role. The pond seemed to take an abnormally long time to fill up afterward.

We may learn the disaster’s cause when the ice melts and we can get to that drain. Maybe we will never know exactly what happened. The fact remains there is a leak which will have to be fixed. It will take a goodly amount of work and money to get to get the pond back in shape again, not to mention the loss of our fish: bass, bluegill and some expensive algae-eating koi. I doubt that anything but a few minnows escaped through the leak, meaning all the fish are dead and probably pressed into the muck. We learned from our previous draining of the pond, which was intentional and sudden, that the fishes’ instinct to swim against current kept them from going out with the water. We waded through the muck picking up big bass.

How fortunate were we that the ice did not collapse with a dozen skaters on it? Fish can be restocked. The dam and pier can be rebuilt.

The leak that emptied the pond was not a sudden, cataclysmic event. It appears to have been a relatively slow process. It is possible, and I think very likely, that on the day before the collapse was discovered, water was already draining, but the ice was so thick and strong that it remained for a time suspended in place.

Our children and their friends were skating on air.

Sometimes angels are the only explanation.