WILLOW CREEK — What began as a group of idle mill workers with nothing to do but watch the ice has given rise to what may become — whether its inventors intended it or not — an annual custom in Willow Creek.
The mill fell silent on the morning of March 4, when a jam of logs and debris wedged against the ice at Thorne’s Bend, halting the movement of timber downriver and throwing the crew into an unscheduled recess. The men, instead of dispersing to their homes, gathered at the shore of Homan’s Pond — the deep, spring-fed kettle pond that sits beside the mill race — and took up the only subject that occupied the town that week: when the pond would finally clear.
“It started as talk,” said Albert Boucher, a mill hand who was among the group. “Someone said he thought the ice would go out by the end of next week. Someone else said it would hold until April. And then someone — I do not recall who — said, ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’”
The wager was informal. A hat was passed. Each man put in one dollar and wrote his prediction on a slip of paper. The winner would take the entire pot. There was no official record, no designated observer, and — at first — no agreed-upon method for determining the exact moment the ice was “out.”
The men settled on a crude but workable system: a buoy, fashioned from an empty flour barrel and anchored in the deepest part of the pond, would serve as the marker. When the buoy was free to move with the current — meaning the main ice sheet had cleared sufficiently — the ice was declared out.
Twenty-three men entered the first wager. The pot stood at twenty-three dollars.
The ice held for another week. On the morning of April 7, the buoy shifted at approximately 11:52 AM, according to the pocket watch of one of the waiting men. Albert Boucher, whose prediction of April 7 at 11:47 AM was within five minutes of the actual time, was declared the winner.
“I have been watching that pond for twenty years,” Boucher said, pocketing his winnings. “I know how it behaves. It is not a thing you learn in a season.”
The men returned to work the same day — the logjam had broken overnight — but the conversation did not return to normal. The wager had given the idled crew something that a week of staring at the ice had not: a stake in the spring thaw.
“I lost my dollar,” said Lucien Girard, a sawyer at the mill. “But I do not begrudge it. I already have my guess for next year.”
The Gazette makes no prediction as to whether this informal competition will become a permanent fixture of town life. But the paper notes that a precedent has been set, and precedents in Willow Creek have a way of persisting.