Amy in the Garden

This President’s weekend didn’t find me entertaining/hiding from vacationing college students or high school students. I was not elbow-deep in spackle from the winter home reno project. (I should have been, but I wasn’t.) Instead, I found myself with no necessary tasks on the Sunday of President’s weekend, and so I minced across the ice-skating rink formerly known as Driveway, got into the car with imprudently dressed Husband (sneakers for the snow and ice?), and we drove to South Bristol.

Every Sunday of President’s Weekend, the Thompson Ice house has its annual ice harvesting. The ice on the pond is cut into blocks of ice 12” thick, about 2×3’, and according to one of the men pushing the blocks up a ramp, about 250-300 pounds. As the event begins at 9 a.m. and ends at 4, I suspect that the ice blocks weigh 250 pounds in the morning, and weigh 300+ pounds at the end of the day! The ice is stacked into the ice house, with sawdust and hay above and below, “to the depth of a tyne.”

This was a commercial enterprise from 1826 until 1985. The building was deemed unsafe, but rather than sell the business on the open market, the house, property, pond, and dam were designated as a museum to preserve traditional ice harvesting. And visitors every year are grateful for this gift.

We arrived late morning, on one of those spectacular Maine days, when the white snow and blue sky compete for attention:

Here is the scene that greeted us: a motorized saw cutting grid lines into the ice, recently freed rectangles of ice floating free, and delighted visitors.

One of the young ones trying his hand at manually sawing the ice into blocks:

The grid lines are precise:

A close-up of a floating block of ice:

And of the floating rectangles:

The first area of the pond to be carved into ice is the chute that leads to the ramp that leads to the ice house. Lining the chute are happy volunteers, mostly the kids, who man the long tools to encourage the blocks to float towards the ramp:

When the ice blocks touch the ramp, they are guided onto a simple wooden frame that guides them up out of the water and onto the ramp:

The block moves up the ramp until the floor of the ramp drops away,

and the block tips forward and down, and slides into the ice house:

There is a gang of young men in cleated boots that greet the ice block with loud oofs and hollers, and they guide the block into its new home. When the day ends, the ice house will be filled to the rafters with enormous blocks of ice.

Then what? The ice is sold by the block or chipped, and a good bit of it supplies an ice cream party for the community in July. Good deal!

There was a small shed with a movie playing that described the history of the ice house, Thompson Ice House coffee mugs and sweatshirts were for sale, as were hot dogs and baked beans. I opted for the beans, and held the hot cup of amazingly sugary beans in my hands … I watched the ice chips fly into the air, listened to the dropped “r’s” of my neighbahs, and appreciated where I live.

WORDS FROM OTHERS