Henry Lee is no stranger to lake ice.
“I have driven on ice for 40 years. No more. I am done. Period,” he said last week.
For the record, after the Newcastle businessman, who narrowly escaped a sinking car, – a car that broke through the ice and sank in 40 feet of water in Damariscotta Lake Feb. 21 – who could blame him.
As he tells it, Lee was driving his silver Chevy sedan on the lake’s Great Bay about 200 feet off Deep Acres Shore Road in Jefferson, en route to an ice fishing camp where his sons, Alexander and Whitney were waiting. The togue and salmon were biting. He looked forward to another good day.
“They had drilled the ice, and it was 18 inches thick. There was, oh, about six inches of white (colored ice) and 12 inches of clear ice. It was strong, so strong you could have driven an excavator on it,” he said.
“I saw a pressure ridge, where the ice had been pushed together, then came apart. It opened a place that had frozen over so there was just a few inches of thick ice,” he said explaining. He decided to avoid it.
To Lee, reminding a listener he is an experienced ice driver, it didn’t look any different than the rest of the lake, but it was.
“Suddenly, it went crack and I thought ‘I’m going down.'”
Immediately Lee began to punch at his seat belt latch. It gave him a bit of trouble as the water started coming in the door.
When it reached the bottom of the steering wheel, he got the seat belt latch loose and shoved himself out of the door.
“I ended up half in the water and half on the ice. The ice was rough so I was able to pull myself out of the water,” he said.
As he pulled himself onto the ice, he stood up and looked back at his car. All he saw was the trunk. In seconds, it tipped over and dove for the bottom.
“My sons, Alex and Whit saw the whole thing and they hopped on vehicles – a Gator and a four-wheeler – and headed for me.
“‘My God, Dad, you okay?’ one asked,” Lee said.
Lee said he was wet from the waist down, but said he was not cold. His sons drove him to their fishing shack where he was greeted by a blazing wood fire where he dried off, had a snack and took a 20-minute nap.
The family continued fishing as Lee got on his cell phone and tried to summon a diver to mark the site of the drowned Chevy.
“One guy said he would come right out, but four hours later he called back and said he was sorry, but his wife wanted him to watch their kids, Lee said.
“I have been driving on ice for 40 years, but I got tricked and went in the only hole in Damariscotta Lake,” he said.
“You know, I thought, ‘I’m done.’ Every year, there are thousands of people who die in head-on car crashes and hundreds of thousands are disabled. In a head-on crash, you don’t have any time to react at all.
“Sunday was the same day they lost seven vehicles through the ice, was it, on Sebago Lake? I had maybe 10 seconds to get out. I am really lucky,” he said.
Katherine Lee, his wife, chimed in. “We are blessed. Very blessed,” she said.
Sitting in his office on Academy Hill Road, Lee said he spent the next two days working to get the car off the bottom.
As Darby, the office German Shepherd lay on the floor near his desk, Lee said divers went down 40 feet and hooked the vehicle to a wrecker cable. They winched it up two times and two times the ice snapped the cable.
Finally, they drilled a series of about 70 holes in the ice and used a chain saw to create a channel between the holes. That created enough space for the cable to pull the car on shore.
“We got the car out Tuesday and on Wednesday, the insurance company took it away,” he said.
Lee pulled a tiny red digital camera out of his desk, and scrolled it to show a series of photos taken of his silver Chevy, after it was back on land. To a visitor, it looked like a mess.
He then took the camera back and stared at the photos again.
“Forty years driving on the ice…”
“You know, I don’t know why you are here. This is not much of a story,” he said.
