'Watch out for reefs'

“As I set out across the lake, about noontime, the cook, emerging to draw molasses from the barrel, warned me to ‘watch out for reefs’– rifts, that is, in the ice, where a warm current might have melted most of the way through. But the ice was solid, several inches thick, heavy enough to hold a team. There was only gladness in my heart as I started across the wide white plain toward the woods on the far-off shore.’’

Stereoscopic photos of lumber being pushed down a Maine river around 1900

-- Robert Smith, in My Life in the North Woods (1986), a memoir of his stint in a lumber camp in Maine during the Depression.