A Misadventure On The Ice > IDEAS & IDEALS

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For the usual weekly exercise I left my apartment at around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and headed habitually for the Seoul Grand Park which is located within my walking distance. It was New Year's Eve according to  the lunar calendar, and the park was almost deserted. The large parking lot was empty, and a few cars parked in it seemed abandoned and made the place look more desolate. The weather was very cold, and even in my fur coat, wool cap, and heavy leather gloves, I could not feel warm after having had a brisk walking for more than 20 minutes.

     But I felt good and free as usual by the time I arrived at the main gate of the zoo, which seemed closed. As I usually did, I began to make a round of the park area that was open free to the public, and soon I found myself walking on the elevated bank of the huge reservoir of the park. The water in it was completely frozen by the successive freezing temperature. The vast surface of the frozen lake, covered with the immaculate blanket of white snow, with not a human step to be found on it, was, like a virgin soil or forest, a temptation. I felt a sudden and strong urge to walk on it.

     But I knew I was forbidden to do that. There were warnings here and there from the park authorities not to be near to the lake. The water was deep enough to drown any man. In fact, I was not supposed even to walk on the bank. I had already been stopped twice last summer by the park attendant for the trespassing. I liked to walk on the bank because it had the best grass on it and I loved the feeling of the well-grown grass being trodden under my sneakers. But this time I was already far down at the bottom of the bank and stamping the ice with one of my legs to ascertain the hardness  of the ice at the edge of the lake.

     I stood on the ice, and began to move gingerly my steps one after another along the edge. Having made it sure that the ice was hard enough to support me from under, I began to walk freely, and a great surge of thrilling joy, long forgotten but embedded in my childhood memory and experience, came rushing to me. The excitement was reinforced and enhanced significantly by the danger lurking under the ice. It could give way under my weight at any moment, and I could be drowned in the icy cold water. But I was full of life and as much happy as I could be for the first time in many, many years.

     Not a person was to be found around. The whole place was deadly quiet except the intermittent sound of wind sweeping on the snow. I was having the whole park to myself, I thought. Allured by the untrodden white blanket  spread before me, intoxicated by the lengthening footprints on it behind me, and more than anything else, encouraged and emboldened by the absence of the whistle blowings from the park security guards, I became more adventurous. Like a hunter going deeper and deeper into the mountains for a bigger and more dangerous game, I turned  my direction of walking to the center of the lake. I decided to cross the frozen lake, as if I were an Amundsen or an Scott, the great polar explorers in history.

     Then I heard something in the distance. At first I ignored it with effort, but soon I had to admit that it was that familiar as well as dreadul whistle that the guards in this area blew when they saw something or somebody went wrong. I could not determine exactly from which direction the shrill sound  came, but now it was very evident that it was directed at none but me. I looked back and found that I had travelled too far. I was in the middle of the lake. The distance lying ahead of me seemed shorter than the distance I had made.  There was no turning back. I got terrified. I became desperate. I began to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction from which, I thought, the whistle came. I heard nothing  and saw nothing during the foolish, childish, and dangerous escapade on the ice.

     On my arrival at the land I was duly welcomed by a young man in the uniform of the park attendant with a wireless phone in one hand and a shining whistle dangling around his neck. He was as mad as hell at me. His face and neck were crimson with anger and cold. He seemed ready to strike me dead. Finding out that the outlaw or the lunatic--the very object of his ire--was quite advanced in age with white tufts above the ears, he seemed quite perplexed and disappointed, and momentarily seemed to have lost proper words with which to vent his spleen on me. For the next 30 minutes or so, I had to suffer a fusillade of questions, reprimands, and lectures from this young man of my son's age in shame and in silence, like an elementary schoolboy before a stern teacher after having had a very nasty and mischievous play. I apologized over and over again for what I had done, for having caused him a trouble, and promised him sincerely and earnestly not to do it again, and got finally released. He thought I was going to commit suicide, he said.

     On my way back home, I felt angry with the young man who would not understand me even a bit, and ashamed of myself for having failed to make out a strong case for the stunt I had made on the ice. But I knew I could not win the case even if I had attempted. The heart and mind of the young man who caught me was frozen as hard as the water of the lake, and only quick and alive at his duty. Any attempt on my part would only have confirmed his conviction that I was in a serious condition of mental illness. My possible death in the lake would not have ended there and then as my personal misfortune and my families' tragedy; it would have driven this innocent and hard-working young man into some kind of trouble, jeopardized his position, cost his job, or caused him financial damage. I could understand him.

     But still I am angry and unhappy; angry about being interfered and protected, and unhappy at the disappearance of real freedom and joy. Like a bird in the cage I am safe but not free. I miss the time when I was as free as a bird that settles down and flies away when and where it will. I remember one of my boyhood friends was drowned to death in the river of my hometown in one summer, and in one winter I was myself drowned in the icy cold water up to my neck twice when the ice broke under my weight. But the joy and thrill always far outweighed the dangers. And nobody blew the whistle on us. The young guard who treated me like a schoolboy was right. I was a schoolboy again the moment I stepped on the frozen lake that cold evening.
          (February 6, 1998)