yankee coldness

The ice was cut at night, because that’s when it was thickest.

First they scraped the snow off. Snow insulates — a foot of it over the pond means the ice underneath has stopped growing, warmed from above by its own white blanket. So they cleared it, tested the depth, and scored the surface. Before 1825 the scoring was a man with a chisel and a straightedge and a bad back, and the blocks came out crooked, and crooked blocks leave gaps, and gaps are where the warm air gets in. Then Nathaniel Wyeth bolted two parallel blades to a frame, hitched it to a horse, and drove it across the pond like a plow. The ice came up in a grid. Squares, true, all the same size, made to pack against each other with nothing between them.

Twenty-two inches on a side for the blocks staying on the coast. Bigger for the ones going far. That’s the whole physics of the trade in a single measurement — a big cube hides most of itself. The warm world can only reach the outside, and the bigger the block the less outside it has for every pound of inside. A block bound for the Caribbean had to be large enough to arrive as something other than water. A block bound for India had to be larger still.

The horses wore spiked shoes and the men wore cork. The pond was black under the lanterns and the blades were sharp, and a horse that broke through came up — if it came up — heavy and thrashing and freezing, and everyone out on the ice knew the sound it made.

The sawdust was free. It was the sawmill’s garbage, mounded up by the acre, and it happened to be one of the finest insulators anyone had found. Packed around the blocks inside a double-walled icehouse, it carried a Massachusetts January most of the way to September. The whole trade ran on two things nobody wanted: a pond in winter, and a mill’s waste.

In 1833 a brig called the Tuscany left Boston with a hundred and eighty tons of New England pond in her hold. She crossed the equator twice and came up the Hooghly River four months later with a hundred tons of it still solid. The other eighty had become the sea. The British in Calcutta crowded the dock to watch it unloaded, the porters staring at the cubes coming off, someone calling them crystal blocks of Yankee coldness. Within three days the residents had raised the money for a proper stone icehouse on Bankshall Street — a city of palaces was not going to keep its ice in a wooden shed.

Four annas a pound. Cheaper, as it turned out, than the murky local slush hauled down from Chinsurah. And so a pond that had frozen in the dark outside Boston, that a horse had walked across in spiked shoes, was sold by the pound in the heat of Bengal — to people who had mostly never held a piece of their own winter, because Bengal doesn’t have one.