The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  The letter-by-letter decoding of Morse is much more laborious than the work I’ve been doing on the Greenlandic songs. There is no punctuation; I don’t even know where the gaps between the words fall. Gradually I impose order on the stream of letters, spelling out a quotation in French. I realize it’s a translation of a work originally in English, although were it to be translated back again, it would only faintly echo the original. The dots and dashes spell out Thoreau’s words, written in his own cabin beside Walden Pond: ‘The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again.’

  Epilogue

  THE ICE-HOUSE

  Walden Pond, Massachusetts, USA

  The oceans

  Íss er árbörkr

  ok unnar þak

  ok feigra manna fár.

  glacies jöfurr.

  Ice is bark of rivers

  and roof of the wave

  and destruction of the doomed.

  Old Icelandic Rune poem

  ‘We sure as hell are screwing up this planet,’ says Abigail Rorer, driving her SUV along the leafy New England lanes to Concord. Sometimes Abigail likes to talk like she’s from a fictional Wild West, not genteel Philadelphia. I’ve heard that a few generations back there was an opera singer in her family. Yet if this artist has inherited anyone’s mantle, it is that of the Dalziel Brothers. A wood engraver who spends hours each day hunched over a magnifier in her studio, she’s also a dedicated observer of the natural world. Years ago Abigail fell in love with Thoreau’s descriptions of his environment, the ponds and vernal pools of her adopted Massachusetts and she too, 50 miles west and 150 years in his wake, has been recording the wildlife – not in words, but in images.

  I have been working with Abigail in her studio for a couple of weeks. She’s making a wood engraving of a fox to illustrate Thoreau’s account of a winter walk. My job is to set his words in metal type, then print the work on a handpress. As I fit the tiny lead letters into the composing stick, tight enough that they will stay true when the ink rollers pass across their faces, I consider the course the words have taken to reach this point. Our publication may be printed with the same technology used in Thoreau’s own time, but we’ve sourced the text from an online edition of his work.

  As a reward for my labour Abigail is taking me on a jaunt to Walden Pond, so I can see where Thoreau lived and wrote. Now the only trace of the cabin is a circumference of stones among the trees – his home would have been almost the same dimensions as my Swiss treehouse, but rather less well-equipped.

  This idyllic spot, now protected, was once exploited. As we walk along the shore, Abigail tells me that it wasn’t just wildlife Thoreau saw from the window of his cabin. During the winter of 1846–47 he was surprised to observe on the pond ‘a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming’. They were cultivating the ice. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the entrepreneur Frederic Tudor had realized that the ponds around Boston froze quickly due to the brisk autumns and cold winters, and he decided to ‘farm’ the ice while the real farmers rested at their firesides. He created a business based on the scarcity and desirability of ice in the days before artificial refrigeration; Thoreau found himself living in the heart of an ice factory.

  Thoreau wrote of Walden: ‘It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’ Tudor only saw the translucent lens coating that eye, the ice – described as ‘arctic crystal’ – which was known for its purity. Thoreau observed its colours:

  the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man’s sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers.

  Like Thoreau, Tudor kept a journal. He observed the temperature and behaviour of the ice daily, recording the data in his ‘ice diarie’. When customers were sceptical that the ponds could be relied upon to supply ice, he would reassure them with a favourite proverb: ‘Winter never rots in the sky’. During the winter of 1827–28, he wrote gleefully: ‘The frost covers the windows, the wheels creek [sic], the boys run, winter rules, and $50,000 worth of ice now floats for me upon Fresh Pond.’ But winter did not ‘rule’ for long that year, and Tudor struggled to meet demand. He was not to know that the Little Ice Age was drawing to a close. By the middle of the century, there would be ‘open winters’ when the ponds did not freeze at all.

  The ice had to be strong enough to hold both the men who worked upon it and the implements of their industry. Tudor’s associate Nathaniel Wyeth had designed an ice-plough. Horses, shod with spikes as they were for winter roads, dragged a scribe over the ice; one end of the scribe sliced a section while the other scored a guideline for the next block. The neat oblongs of ice could then be prised free and edged along channels to the shore. Special tools were required to separate and manoeuvre the frozen sheets. Cold hands were sometimes clumsy. The ice-saws and grapples, the snow planes, hand ploughs and ice-hooks, the fork-splitting bars and the stricking-under bars are still being dredged from the beds of the ponds today.

  Once Tudor had demonstrated how lucrative ice could be, he had to fight off competition. A map of Fresh Pond was drawn up by a Boston surveyor at the height of the trade in 1841 to show ‘the Division Lines of the Proprietors Extended into the Pond and defining the right to the same’. It had become necessary to fix ownership of the surface of the pond on paper. The system was simple: all those who had rights to property along the shore got a share of the ice. ‘Fred. Tudor’ occupied the entire southern side of the pond, beside which the Concord Turnpike ran; his portion was valued at almost 50 acres. Much of the rest of the pond’s surface was apportioned to the Wyeth family, with more modest allowances for the farmers Reed, Coolidge, Bright and Bird. The map, dissected by lines of ownership, resembles modern maps of Antarctica in which territorial claims radiate out from the South Pole.

  The elaborate ritual of the ice harvest was only the beginning of the ice’s journey. The blocks of ice cut by the scribe could be stored side by side leaving a minimal surface area exposed to the air. Even so, the railwaymen on the new branch line to Boston complained of their unusual cargo:

  Its demands are peremptory, and if not instantly obeyed, it weeps itself away . . . It is wet and heavy, sharp and cutting, and without grit or grain enough to keep it quiet, it is ever uneasy, and beating itself against the car and tearing off its covering . . . while today we are thus over-worked, tomorrow and next day it may give us nothing to do.

  The railways transported the ice to many cities. A contemporary Baedeker for travellers to the US notes that the ‘musical tinkling’ of iced water was a characteristic sound of American hotels. Yet Tudor had always conceived the ice trade as an international enterprise. He knew his best markets would be in ‘Tropical Climates’. The plan to ship ice across the oceans was seen by many as a joke: merchants would not charter a vessel for Tudor’s first venture to Martinique in 1806, and insurance was not to be had. It took all his persistence to find a boat to transport the first cargo. Several tonnes melted on the journey, but enough reached its destination for the venture to be worth repeating. The ice from the ponds of Massachusetts was destined to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to India.

  In the Concord Museum, Abigail and I admire a set of a dozen pencils, made by J. Thoreau & Co. The label, with its conventional border of printed fleurons, reads: ‘Refined lead pencils | Hard, medium, and soft | Possessing the various qualities required in the Arts’. It’s said that Thoreau improved the design of the pencils during the brief period that he worked for the family business, but judging by the journals on di
splay he preferred to write with a quill pen. It is in ink that his urgent, angular copperplate races over the pages between the marbled covers of his notebooks.

  Abigail calls in at the bank, and is given some free root beer lollipops by the teller. On the drive back we suck them down to the little papery sticks as we discuss the future. Abigail is planning to sell the books we’re printing at a trade fair in Oxford in a few months’ time. ‘You have to find somewhere to live so I can come stay when I visit,’ she tells me. ‘I can’t afford those English hotels.’

  She’s joking, but the idea of settling down is attractive. What began as a drive for economy has become a habitual restlessness. My quest for freedom has resulted in its own constraints. Even Thoreau left the woods eventually, his desire to ‘live deliberately’ tempered by his sense of obligation to his friends.

  Although Thoreau was not an advocate of international travel, preferring to examine the environment close to his home, he benefitted from the global exchange of ideas. Louis Agassiz passed through Boston on a lecture tour the same winter that Thoreau observed the ice being harvested on Walden Pond, and the glaciologist’s assistant, James Cabot, brought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita to Concord. Thoreau was excited to think of the ‘stupendous’ philosophy he was reading having crossed the oceans, just as the Walden ice was to do, creating an elemental connection with people in far-off places: ‘our buckets as it were grate together in the same well’. The wise words of the ancient text seemed a fair exchange for the ice itself:

  Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides . . . and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

  The Walden ice did go to Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, although there it was enjoyed by the governing elites of the British East India Company rather than by Brahmins. Frederic Tudor had noticed that ships travelling from Boston across the Atlantic to Indian ports were loaded with ballast, which could be conveniently (and cheaply) replaced with cargoes of ice. To satisfy his creditors after a catastrophic coffee speculation, he decided to take one more risk. The Tuscany sailed on 12 May 1833 with many tonnes of ice on board. Tudor wrote to its captain: ‘As soon as you have arrived in latitude 12 degrees north you will have carried ice as far south as it has ever been carried before, and your Ship becomes a discovery ship’. By contrast to the ships setting sail in search of a Northwest Passage, this captain did not want the ice to melt.

  As the Tuscany approached the coast of India four months later, the Board of Customs, Salt and Opium authorized the landing of the cargo duty-free to allow swift entry for the rapidly melting luxury. Such a waiver was unprecedented. Furthermore, the India Gazette reported, the Board directed that ‘every facility may be afforded in the Customs’ Department for [the ice’s] conveyance, without delay or impediment, from the ship to the godown or place of store’. The crew were even permitted to unload their cargo overnight, to save it from the sun’s heat. By morning the ice was already in use. The journalist Joachim Stocqueler, one of the first to board the Tuscany, wrote:

  How many Calcutta tables glittered that morning with lumps of ice! The butter dishes were filled; the goblets of water were converted into miniature Arctic seas with icebergs floating on the surface. All business was suspended until noon, that people might rush about to pay each other congratulatory visits and devise means for perpetuating the ice-supply. Everybody invited everybody to dinner, to taste of claret and beer cooled by the importation.

  Newspapers offered advice on the best means of collecting and transporting the ice while keeping it as cool as possible (‘a woollen wrapper or a basket of rice-chaff’) and warned of substances, such as saltpetre or salt, which might endanger its integrity. Preserving the ice supply for as long as possible was a matter of common concern. As well as cooling claret and beer, and preserving perishable foods, ice was used to soothe the brows of invalids. It was thus claimed that the ice sustained life itself, as well as a certain colonial lifestyle. Within two years an ice-house had been built in Calcutta.

  Yet some received the merchandise with scepticism. Ice is the nemesis of a foolish adjutant crane – a scavenging bird – who unwittingly swallows a chunk of it in Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Undertakers’:

  Immediately [says the crane] I was afflicted with an excessive cold which, beginning in my crop, ran down to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech, while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I danced in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath and then I danced and cried out against the falseness of this world; and the boatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter, setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing at all in my crop when I had finished my lamentings!

  Kipling intended the crane’s indiscriminate gobbling as a moral on the consequences of greed. But Tudor was not lamenting: he and his partners each made $3,300 on the pioneer shipment of ice to Calcutta, and the trade with India was to redeem him from ruin. Some commentators even compared Boston’s ice to the gold of California. Tudor began to export ice to Europe, China and Australia, and by the time he died in 1864 he was America’s first post-Revolution millionaire.

  The Revolutionary War had ended on 3 September 1783, and George Washington resigned as commander-in-chief of the US army a few days before Christmas. With time on his hands, he looked to improve his estate at Mount Vernon. He sought advice on constructing an ice-house from his fellow patriot Robert Morris, who responded on 15 June 1784 with a description of his own:

  The Door for entering this Ice house faces the north, a Trap Door is made in the middle of the Floor through which the Ice is put in and taken out. I find it best to fill with Ice which as it is put in should be broke into small pieces and pounded down with heavy Clubs or Battons such as Pavers use, if well beat it will after a while consolidate into one solid mass and require to be Cut out with a Chizell or Axe. I tried Snow one year and lost it in June. The Ice keeps until October or November and I believe if the Hole was larger so as to hold more it would keep untill Christmas.

  ‘P.S.’ he adds. ‘Thatch is the best covering for an Ice House.’ Washington’s diary for January 1785 mentions the preparation of two wells for ‘the reception of ice’, one indoors and one on his estate. By the end of the month both had been filled with ice. In an entry for June, Washington laments: ‘Opened the Well in my Cellar in which I laid up a store of Ice but there was not the smallest particle remaining.’ The outdoor well had a larger store, and it was this ice-house that he worked to improve the following autumn. In subsequent years, his diary records ice gathering during January. The ice was taken from the frozen Potomac, only an hour’s paddle downriver from the mudflats where the airport that once bore his name would be built. The river that now guides pilots previously cooled presidential drinks.

  I stare at the map on the screen in the seatback. It feels like an out-of-body experience to watch the tiny white aircraft – the very one that contains me – twitch pixel by pixel up the coast of America. The flight path arcs towards the tip of Greenland, edging the Atlantic, rather than crossing the ocean directly towards Heathrow. So much for travelling transatlantic. I know the route is shorter this way, but it makes it look as if the pilot is as nervous as I am about flying over water. Before the sun disappears, I am reassured by a glimpse of the ice-covered peaks which signalled my first investigations into cold, many thousands of feet below.

  A book published in Amsterdam in 1665 – Mundus Subterraneus – contains a map depicting an unusual island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. (
At some point during the book’s existence, the oil in the printer’s ink began to seep through the paper, so that the text printed on the verso of the map can be seen, a faint moire pattern of mirror-image words.) The great Dutch mariners would never have dreamed of setting a course for Atlantis, even though it was marked on such maps, for its first mention in surviving records (by Plato around 360 BCE) details only the moment of its vanishing:

  But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.

  Despite its disappearance, cultural references to Atlantis persisted, from accounts by classical writers like Plato, through to its use as a representative ‘fabulous island’ in Walden, and contemporary fiction and film. As with the legendary Thule, there are many theories about its origin, its location and the reasons it sank beneath the waves. Some writers even suggest that Atlantis and Thule were the same place.

  One of the most recent incarnations of Atlantis was brought into being by the American artist Robert Smithson. In 1969, five hundred years after Mundus Subterraneus, Smithson created a scale model of the sunken island in broken glass at a site in New Jersey, and then – as was his practice – made installation sketches, templates to show curators how to recreate the work at other locations in the future. I’d recently seen a recreation of Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) on my travels and, curious about Smithson’s way of working, I’d looked up the installation sketches online. The drawings are rough and immediate, one giving a bird’s-eye view of jagged glass, much like the icy mountains below me. ‘SEVERAL TONNES OP BROKEN CLEAR NEEDED’ read Smithson’s instructions in scribbled block capitals. ‘TRACE OUTLINES (APPROX.) ON PLOOR LIGHTLY THAN [sic] FILL IT IN.’ There’s a side view too, to convey the desired height: ‘BALANCE BIG PIECES AGAINST EACH OTHER, USE SMALLER PIECES TO SHORE THEM UP.’ The big pieces are shored up by the smaller ones: Smithson understood how an artistic reputation is built. Knowing his works would erode with time, he made films and took aerial photographs to document them. Still, I get the feeling the installation sketches were an afterthought – Smithson’s best-known works are not to be found in museums. Spiral Jetty, a large earthwork made from basalt rocks, salt crystals and mud, curls out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. He began construction on the jetty in April 1970 – the same year that Earth Day was inaugurated. It was his first work requiring the purchase of land rights, and he had difficulty finding contractors willing to be involved in such an audacious project. At the time it was made, Spiral Jetty was submerged in the lake. In recent years, drought has caused the water to recede far from the shore, and the jetty is visible for long periods. Where the outline of the artwork was once lapped by mineral-rich lake water, pale sand now blows across it.