The Quietude Of Ice

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

The friends I had dinner with last night have a standing joke with me. Sooner or later the conversation will revolve around current events or “news” and I sit and listen and nod my head. We all know I usually have no idea who or what they are talking about but still get a laugh when I ask a question along the lines of, “Who is this John Ashcroft, anyway?” This is the result of slicing 99% of the media out of my life. My mind has gone elsewhere. Last night the conversation and dynamics were not out of the usual and I realized we have very active minds which to a large degree are filled with agitation. Myself included, but I’m glad my agitation is mostly concerned with things I might be able to do something about.

This morning I’m thinking of E.V. Moody, an old man from my childhood who from all appearances had a peaceful mind. In the early 1960’s my family would stop by his business, Moody’s Ice House on the shore of Lake Wentworth in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. We would be camping in a tent for the summer on the other side of the lake, and buy blocks of ice from him for our cooler. In the barn, hidden in great mounds of damp sawdust were hundreds of blocks of ice in various sizes. It was cool and smelled of pine, and it was quiet. There were no compressors or fans we associate with refrigeration. No radio or phone. Just the quietude of ice, slowly slowly melting and finding its way back to the lake.

Mr. Moody knew my mom from when she was a kid growing up in Wolfeboro. He was always pleasant but didn’t have a lot to say. A big barrel of a man, he would methodically scrape away the sawdust revealing the luminous blocks and with his tongs pick one up and sling it over his shoulder onto the leather smock covering his back. He’d carry the block and set it in a dish pan we had on the floor in the back of the car. A maze of tiny air bubbles and their curvy trails filled the ice. I’d sit there and slide my bare feet on the cold glistening surface and wonder about the mysterious bubbles, air from the previous winter trapped, waiting to get out. We’d pay him fifty cents and be on our way.

The part of Mr. Moody’s work I never saw was the winter harvesting. He and a helper would go out on the ice with a team of horses pulling a heavy wooden sled. With hand saws they would cut the blocks, then load them on the sled and haul them in. Every day they were out in the open, this was their work, heavy and simple. I have spent some time on the frozen lakes and except for the wind and the occasional cracking of the ice, it is quiet. Working on the ice, day in and day out, two men, two horses, there must have been plenty of space for thinking. I wonder what filled Mr. Moody’s thoughts. I wonder what he said when he talked with friends.

Gordon Bunker