Like the pearly pink flesh of a newly plucked chicken, I stared curiously at my forearm. Tiny blonde hairs stood at attention from each goose-bump as I shivered there, snuggled into a pile of sawdust in Uncle Parks’ ice house. It was early July in Blackfoot, when the Idaho sun had found its happy place up there in the cloudless sky, set plump and glowing against a soft baby-blanket blue. The skies of my typical non-Idaho summer days were a murky grey, washed over a distant blue, the residue of belching Pittsburgh steel mills painting a dirty wash over God’s intentions. But for a few sacred weeks Idaho was home, and that trusty Idaho wind kept the skies clean and clear.
The ice house was, now that I am old enough to think through these kind of things, actually the domain of my Uncle Parks, the second eldest of eleven children in my mother’s family. It was one of his many entrepreneurial ventures. He and his brothers-in-law and some sisters and other hired hands travelled by horse and wagon and early versions of flat bed trucks up toward the mountains, through Ashton and Island Park, up to the edge of the Snake River where the altitude in winter kept the air well below freezing.
Deep into the wild winters up there in the mountains they took their long wide-toothed saws and their well-earned muscles and set to work. Before the era of power-tools, they raised large pick axes over their heads and hurled them down into the surface of the thick frozen river, then turned massive drills to create deep holes in the frozen skin of the Snake. From that beginning they sawed large rectangular chunks of ice, which they rolled over logs and up onto the wagons.
When the sun had crossed the sky and was already working its way into tomorrow, they harnessed up the horses, strapped down the logs and the ice, covered them with canvas and burlap, and made their way back down to Blackfoot. Next morning, they rolled those large blocks of frozen water off the wagon and onto the hand-made conveyor, up into the darkest corners into mounds of sawdust there in the massive barn behind the house. The cold from the ice wrapped itself around each block, creating a natural refrigerator, insulated by the darkness and the sawdust and the thick wooden walls of the barn. By the time June arrived, the ice was still frozen, and would remain so even into the hottest months of the year.
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| Uncle Parks, Uncle Archie and Aunt Mary (my mother's sister) |
Every human child should have an icehouse to visit on hot summer days. A dark, cool space that raises the hair of their innocent arms, where the air enters the nostrils chilled and clean, with a faint hint of aromatic wood. And every child, then, should have access to a Parrish Ice House ice pick, so they, too, could plunge that thin steel pick into a chunk of ice, chipping off pieces small enough to plop into their mouths. Then, refreshed by the frozen waters of the old Snake River, every child should also have an accommodating pile of sawdust in which to daydream away a hot summer afternoon.
