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(names have been made initials, since permission was not asked of the folks written up in this story. )

 

Dear mom & friends,

I was invited to help our Amish builder with his ice harvesting

activities today, so I took a last minute holiday to do so. I got there

just at lunch time, and found out during the mealtime discussions that

V. C., the father of our builder (& grandfather to many of the

crew) grew up in the H. Ohio area. I said I was Church of the

Brethren, and he said that "there used to be this church called E.

N. near where he grew up..." I said "that's my church!", and he

said they used to sled down the road in front of the church in winter

when they were kids. He said "I. W. used to be a Deacon there,

though it was probably his son E., now". I said it was, and that my

great grandpa was the one that dug the basement out from underneath that

church. He said that L. High School had been built upon a portion of

his father's land, and was telling me about how the playing fields and

the stadium were originally built. We then marveled at what a small

world it is. I never found out this connection while we were working

together on our barn, so I'm very glad I went today.

Harvesting the ice was interesting, too. I'd thought it might be wet

work, so I'd dug out all the wool clothes I could find, but that was

unnecessary - they had their system worked out so that they stayed dry

and the lifting was minimized. Kind of like an assembly line, too - as

fast as one wagon was filled, another one that had just been emptied

would arrive to replace it. There are about a dozen "ice houses" in the

Amish neighborhood - rooms insulated with 6-8 inches of polyurethane

spray foam (the kind in RV), and half of the crew was unloading the ice

from the wagons with the ice tongs onto a wooden chute that went right

into the icehouse door, where a couple of folks were inside stacking the

ice solid to the ceiling. An old refrigerator (minus the coils &

electricity) was punched through one wall of each icehouse so that any

food in the refrigerator is surrounded on 3 sides by the ice in the

icehouse. I helped unload one wagon, then went off to the lake where

they were cutting ice to help there. The waterplants frozen in the ice

look like modern art.

At the lake, the two littlest boys, twins, were running about on the ice

slab with snow-shovels, scraping off the next area to be cut. The Amish

had a saw on sled skids with a blade nearly 3 feet in diameter powered

by a gas motor, similar to the kind of saw you see for cutting through

pavement or concrete slabs. The operator made several long cuts parallel

to the edge of the ice about 16" apart and almost all the way through

the ice except for one inch of thickness. The ice was about 5 inches

thick, and a fountain of ice shavings shot out of the saw arcing about

20 ' away, looking very much like what a snowblower throws, except it

was slushy, not snow. After a half-dozen cuts, he'd stop and make the

right angle cuts so that the ice was now scored in small squares one

person could lift. Then they used a handsaw to cut the edges free from

the banks, and they float the big slabs of scored ice all the way across

the open water, guiding the ice raft with long poles while walking along

the pond bank, until they got to the area where they had a ramp

extending down into the water and up over the edge of the wagon.

I was helping to herd the ice cubes onto the bottom of the ramp, using a

pitchfork to guide the ice rafts and break them up into cubes along the

sawcuts while I was standing on the bank. One boy had a set of hooks

with a wooden handle and tied to a rope the end of which went up over

the ramp and wagon and into the hands of some of the younger boys. He'd

put the hooks on the end cube in a line of three ice cubes at the bottom

of the ramp, give a shout, and the other boys gave a heave on the rope,

thus hauling all three cubes up the ramp until they spilled onto the

wagon, where three elder boys were snagging the cubes with ice tongs and

lining them up into snug rows standing on end. Took maybe 45 minutes to

load one layer on a wagon, which was about all the two draft horses

could be expected to pull, so then off they would go, and another wagon

and team of horses would take its place.

This was the second of day they'd been cutting ice (the first was new

years day). They'd started at dawn and worked to dusk, filling two ice

houses with somewhere between 12-14 wagon loads, each containing about a

hundred cubes. So they were about 1/3 of the way done with the job at

the end of the day, with 8 more icehouses remaining to be filled. Not

every household has an ice house, but perhaps one per farm. Some of the

smaller or younger households just have iceboxes, and they go to

retrieve a block of ice for their ice box every few days throughout the

summer from their extended family's icehouse. There was a crowd of about

20 menfolk (including boys of all ages) helping on the job who ate lunch

at our builder's home, and grandpa Snyder would have been very happy,

because there were 2-3 types of homemade pie. Of course grandma's "ice

wagon" song was running through my mind all day long. It felt like

family, though of course I couldn't understand the German they spoke to

each other, but they were very gracious & hospitable to me and spoke

English most of the time in my hearing. And they never tried to make me

feel odd about crossing the gender lines by preferring the men's work to

that of the women (not to mention cross-dressing), though it doesn't

happen in their culture.

I was thinking of you a lot and wishing I could share it all with you,

but this will have to do. Taking photos would have been very rude, of

course. Chris sat this one out because he'd only had 4 hours sleep in 24

and wouldn't have made it through the day, but maybe he'll get to help

later this week or month.

Love, Christina