The Ice Challenge

The Ice Challenge



“You ready?” Chris asks as he walked up the stairs from the basement where he lives with his wife and infant son.

“Ready if you are,” I respond with pretend confidence. I get up from the bright red couch and crack my back and stretch. I’m stalling. It is warm and comfortable here in our parent’s living room, and I want to postpone going outside as long as possible.

            Chris is dressed in thin blue cotton shorts and a plain white t-shirt, and I am wearing the same since I borrowed his clothes, though they are much too big for me. Chris is over six feet tall and a hefty 230 pounds (“All muscle,” he says). He has challenged me to an impromptu “duel” which requires bare legs, but I foolishly hadn’t thought to pack shorts for my weekend trip to my parents’ home in early January. My lack of attire seemed like enough reason to call off the duel, but Chris quickly overcame that obstacle by rummaging through his dirty laundry and throwing some crusty work-out shorts my way. He always was a very kind and thoughtful big brother.

            We pause and brace ourselves by the back door for a moment before plunging into the 25 degree night outside. The backyard is covered in six inches of snow crusted over with ice from the past few days’ freezing and thawing—not exactly ideal for making a snow angel. The challenge of our duel is to see who can lay face down in the snow the longest. Chris originally stipulated that the challenge be completed in our underwear, but I insisted we bulk up to shorts and a thin shirt. Safety (and modesty) first. I don’t really know how these kinds of challenges go since I’m usually just a bystander. Our older brother Ryan, who is 27, typically thinks up these competitions and challenges Chris, who is 25. It’s become a family tradition. The boys, as we’ve always affectionately called the pair, have been getting themselves into trouble their whole lives. They’ve both got scars and stories to go with them.

We hesitantly walk out onto the freezing cement of the patio and Chris sees that I am still wearing socks. “What are you thinking? Get those off—you can’t have socks on for a duel.”

“You really think these thin little socks—“ Chris cuts off my protest with a raised eyebrow he learned from our disciplinarian mother, and I obediently take off my socks. As the creator of the challenge, Chris gets to make the rules, so I wait while he selects a snow mound for us to lie in.

            “Okay, you can keep your feet on the cement of the patio, and you can lift your head up, but the rest of your body has to be in the snow, deal?”

            “Deal,” I sigh, though I’m smiling a little too.

Chris hasn’t stopped smiling since he first tackled me half an hour ago and said, “Lani, it’s time to duel.”

The force of the tackle had left me breathless, but after a moment I wheezed, “Don’t you have to slap me in the face with a glove first?”

“No, I just have to offend you. So… you stink. Now let’s duel.” He was so excited; I didn’t have a choice other than submission. Well, that and he wouldn’t get off of me until I agreed.

We shake hands and slowly lower ourselves to the ground. The bitter cold of the ice and snow penetrate our worthless cotton coverings immediately and we wince as we settle into the frozen snow. I can’t help but flinch when the bare skin of my legs touches the ice and I gasp, “Chris! Why are we doing this?”

            “Because Ryan isn’t here!” Chris grins. Ryan is across the country attending dental school. He will graduate in a few months, but it seems that Chris has chosen me to fill the void in the meantime. As I lay there in the snow in the middle of the night, I pray that when Ryan graduates he will move much, much closer.

            “You guys are nuts!” our mom shouts from her warm lookout by the door. Chris and I just smile at each other and keep shivering. We’re lying on our stomachs side by side in a pile of snow with maximum skin exposed at midnight in January. Our skin is quickly turning red and our necks are getting sore from holding them up above the ice. I know we look ridiculous, but it’s a sibling thing. It just has to be done.



            I peeked around the corner of the houseboat and watched as my brothers swam in the distance. It was getting dark, but the night air was still warm from the intense desert heat of the day. At the peak of that heat, I had watched the boys leap off a fifty foot cliff into the cool waters of Lake Powell below. From the safety of a jet ski below, my dad and I watched them climb the massive rock and saw them deliberate at the top. They were afraid of the height and the outward curve of the cliff. They tried to psych themselves up a dozen times but failed. After twenty minutes, Dad shouted, “If you’re scared, you won’t clear it. Just come down and we’ll find another place.”

            Ryan turned back to climb down the cliff, but Chris didn’t follow. Ryan felt the rush of air as Chris leapt off the ledge and heard him yell on the way down, but by the time he turned back he just saw the splash as Chris entered the water. He couldn’t be outdone by his younger brother, not when he had spent so long building up a reputation and keeping Chris in submission. He had to jump. Down on the jet ski, I heard Dad whisper, “Oh no…” Ryan was naturally the more cautious of the two boys, and now he had to force himself to defy the instinct evolution had instilled in him: survival. My own heart beat faster as I watched my brother prime himself for the jump. He bent his knees, paused, and took a flying leap into the air. He plummeted to the water, flailing the whole way, and hit the surface hard. He limped the rest of the day.

            From my spot by the houseboat, I could see that the boys were wrestling in the water, which didn’t seem safe even to me at ten-years-old. But who was I to correct them. They were bigger and stronger and cooler and braver than me. I watched Ryan dunk Chris a few times, and then saw Chris dive under the water to grab Ryan’s legs and pull him down. This was the basis of their brotherly bond, and I could have no part of it. Feeling the weight of my own inadequacy, I climbed the ladder up to the boat to rejoin my parents.



            “Keep track of the time, Mom. We need to know what our first record is going to be,” Chris says.

            “First?” I ask hesitantly. “As in, preceding a second? We’re going to do this again?”

            “Sure! This is just the first of many challenges. You’ve proved yourself a worthy opponent.” Chris lets his chin rest on the snow to give his neck a break. “I’m surprised that you’re still out here—I thought you would have gone in after five minutes! Ryan would have given up already, so he’d be proud of you too.”

As Ryan gets older, he is getting less tough, or, as Chris puts it, wussier. Although they are very close in age, Chris feels infinitely more young and playful. I am four years younger than Chris, so he has claimed me as his new playmate. I am torn between feeling flattered and feeling foolish, so I settle for feeling nothing since some of my body is beginning to go numb. The parts that aren’t tingling with numbness are burning with pain as the rough ice rubs my skin raw. I almost expect to see blood against the white ice when I reposition my arms to relieve the ache on the bottom of my forearms.

Chris is struggling. He wiggles, trying to flatten out the rock hard snow with his body. He is high-centered on a peak of the uneven snow and the ice is digging into his skin. He looks like an ill-equipped polar bear trying to skate across the frozen tundra on his belly. Or a flopping fish that’s not quite dead when they pack it in ice.

“Give up yet?” I sneer.

“Never.”

“All right, I hope you’re ready to sleep out here.”

When Chris was a teenager, he was even more reckless than he is now, and having an evil mastermind for a brother only made his daredevil tendencies worse. While they were (supposed to be) cleaning out the basement one summer, they found an old bicycle.  As Ryan looked out over the backyard, he was overcome by a stroke of devilish genius.

Our childhood home in rural Ohio was set on three acres of secluded land outside of town. The house itself was built on the edge of a sloping hill, and at the bottom of the hill there was a large manmade lake that served as a backup reservoir for the city. It was a perfect place for my siblings and I to grow up, straight out of a fairytale, and my brothers used the landscape to their full advantage. We had a canoe and a kayak that we kept down by the waterfront, and Ryan’s plan made unique use of them. Together, though under Ryan’s direction, the boys stacked the kayak on top of the canoe and leaned a piece of plywood against the tower, creating a very unstable ramp. Ryan then instructed Chris, the perpetual guinea pig who always had to try their experiments first, to ride the bike down the hill at top speed and fly off the ramp and into the lake.

I was only twelve, too young and scared to be a part of their teenage roughhousing, so I would sit on the deck above the hill and watch jealously as they whooped and yelled and splashed into the muddy lake. It was dangerous, but telling them was no use. Our dad knew that, and when he came home one day to discover them risking their lives for a bit of fun, his only comment was, “You know, it’s probably safer if you do that over on this side.” He knew better than to try to dissuade them; the boys would just keep doing it anyway. He could only make it as safe as possible and be ready when they came home bruised and bleeding. He was a doctor, and we often mused about how fortunate it was that two such raucous and daring sons should be born to a man who could mend them (and had many times). Dad had never had to mend me. As the baby sister, I was only permitted to be a spectator to their antics.

We have been lying in the snow for 15 minutes and our bodies ache terribly. We yelp and cry out in pain, but we laugh in between the cries and wonder if our neighbors are watching over the fence as we test our pride. Chris’s wife comes out with a camera and photo-documents the experience, and we only laugh harder when we see how ridiculous we look stretched out in the ice like freshly caught fish.

Mom decides the contest has gone on long enough. She sneaks up behind us and shoves a handful of icy snow up our shirts, thinking that it might encourage us to get up sooner.

“Mom! No!” we howl when we realize what she is doing, but it is no use. The sharp edges of the frozen snow cut into our backs and we squirm with discomfort.

“Now will you come in?” she laughs.

Chris and I look at each other and narrow our eyes in (semi)mock-aggression. All of my bare skin is red and raw from rubbing against the razor sharp ice, but I will not give up until Chris does. After years of being the odd one out, too young to play and too weak to fight, I know I have a chance. He will always beat me in strength, but I know I can best him in endurance.

“Sorry, Mom. I can’t give in yet; Chris is still too cocky.” I think I see Chris’s eyes gleam and his mouth twitch with the slightest grin. The time is creeping by and my toes are burning against the freezing cement. I bitterly remember the thin socks that Chris made me take off. The chunks of ice on our backs are slowly melting and ice water is dripping down our sides.

“It should be physically impossible to be this cold and also feel like your skin is on fire.” I say as my teeth chatter uncontrollably.

“You could always go in…”

“No way, man. You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into when you challenged me. You are going to miss Ryan so bad by the time this is over.”

Chris and Ryan wrestled constantly as kids and teenagers. They would be watching TV together and the moment commercials came on, they would leap off their respective couches and proceed to beat one another, laughing the whole time. I loved to watch them fight because they looked so ridiculous. Every once in a while, I would get pulled into the dogpile and the combined weight of my muscular brothers would crush me. They beat more softly when I was involved out of consideration for my girlish sensitivities, but the force of the punches would always escalate as the brawl went on and eventually I would have to yell out or cry to be set free. This, of course, made me seem like a bad sport. I wanted to be a part of the “fun” and feel connected to my brothers, but I couldn’t keep up. The boys ran fast and hit hard. They kept me around because they had to and also because I was good for teasing, but even that got old. Ryan once told our dad that he hoped he never had a daughter because he could barely handle me and I was just his sister. I was merely an annoyance to the brothers I idolized for most of my childhood.

We’ve been lying in the snow for half an hour now, and I secretly know I can’t handle much more. Our doctor dad finally comes out of the house, where he has been watching and laughing from the window, and tells us we need to come in or we’re going to hurt ourselves.

“Well…” We look at each other hopefully.

“I guess we could call it a draw.”

We roll onto our sides and slowly lift ourselves off the snow. Our warm bodies have melted the ice, leaving life-size imprints. We’re shaking as we hobble into the house—we can’t feel our feet so we walk on our heels. All I can think is “Get in the house, get in the house…”, and I’m sure Chris is thinking the same thing. We step into the warm kitchen and almost immediately cry out in unified pain. The sudden heat makes our skin burn like fire, like someone is roasting us over a spit. I squirm and can’t relieve the aching burn covering the front of my body.

Chris is bent over rubbing the skin on his legs and laughing like I haven’t heard him laugh in a long time. Our eyes tear, partly from pain and partly from laughter, and I love it. I’m thrilled to have been chosen for a challenge, even if it was just born out of boredom. I know I held my own against Chris and proved that I can keep up now. Sometime between high school and college, my brothers decided I was worth another chance, and I’m proud to have met the challenge, even if it was ridiculous. It’s a sibling thing. It just has to be done.