Outside, the frigid Lake Erie wind rattles the windowpanes like a freight train. I bury my head in my brand new pillow and rub my bare feet together fast, trying to warm them up. Tonight the wind chill factor could reach 40 below, the Channel 3 weatherman says. He wears an ugly plaid leisure suit and reports the weather with his cocker spaniel sitting on a carpet covered box—the weather dog, he calls him. Things around here are sure going to take some getting used to.

They say some guy is doing it again …

Well, that boy with the shaggy brown hair and bright red shirt knows all about it. I can’t remember his name for the life of me yet. I hunker down further in the not quite warmed up bed. Anyway, he says that every year some fool—he puckers his lips up like a sucker fish to push the word out of his mouth along with a shower of spit (my mom sure wouldn’t let me call anyone that)—takes off walking from Ohio to Canada across Lake Erie.

From Ohio to Canada? one of the girls asks. She sounds just like Minnie Mouse.

Because the big lake freezes solid as a rock, you see. The boy crosses his arms across his chest, full of facts.

After the school bus drops me and my sister off, I look up a map of the United States and Canada, finding Lake Erie in between. It's right there in the two-ton box of Encylopedia Britannicas that my mom asks me to put on the bottom shelf in the den. Well, maybe it could be done, I think.

I try to imagine the guy’s footsteps in the snow. Wonder if he listens for cracks in the ice with each step, just like we do when ice skating across frozen farm ponds with sluggish catfish snoozing way down below.

But what’s worse, the boy says—and I am seriously beginning to wonder if this kid is just a know-it-all or what because by this time he has the attention of half of the fifth-grade class— is that he’s taken along a pack horse with him. Can you imagine that? A packhorse across Lake Erie?

Yes.

I can.

The snow is swirling around outside beyond my Priscilla curtained windows now, just like my mind. I can see the horse. He’s a buckskin. His head’s hung low, dropped down against the wind. His tail is whipping around in between his hocks, and he is simply miserable. He’s slowly marching behind the guy whose doing it again through the snow. I know the horse won’t know to listen for cracks in the ice with each step. How could he? I wonder why, if the guy has such a bad case of wanderlust, he couldn’t just jump on a train or something?

And leave that poor innocent horse out of it.

I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep tonight. In the morning I will ask my mom if she’s seen anything on the Channel 3 news about some fool taking his poor horse walking from Ohio to Canada across frozen solid Lake Erie.

Jane West would never let Johnny do anything as stupid as that.

Photos: Marx Toy Museum