Our school sat on a rise directly across the street from the lake. Ashfield “consolidated” school was called so because it included grades one through 12 after a fire destroyed the original high school.
Arriving there as a sixth grader, I was assigned a desk with a view — right there next to a window. It was a combined fifth- and sixth-grade classroom, with the fifth grade on one side of the room and sixth grade on the other.
The teacher carried on the classroom work in an orderly fashion, and with my work being quickly finished, I had free time to gaze at the lake in its various guises — blue and sparkling in Autumn sunshine, grey and sullen on dreary rainy days. It was more fascinating than that page of 50 fractions waiting for me.
But one winter day, as I looked out at the frozen expanse and thought about skating that afternoon, I noticed that something was going on at our end of the lake. There was a truck backing down toward the edge where there was some sort of platform. I could also see a group of men with ropes and what looked like a very long saw of some sort going out on the ice.
I poked the kid in front of me and whispered “what’s going on down there?”
“They’re cutting ice” he answered.
“Cutting ice … whatever for?”
That was a new one to me. After school I asked my dad and he told me that many people in town still had iceboxes to keep their food cold — they weren’t using electric ones, yet.
Mr. Denton and other men cut the ice in blocks and sold them to those who ordered ice from him. The ice was then cut in blocks and floated to the platform, where they were hauled onto the truck.
My dad told me that it was quite an undertaking, and could be dangerous, as well. He said once a man lost a team of horses when they fell in and drowned, and the man barely escaped the same fate. True to small town neighborliness, money was raised to help that man buy a new team.
I still couldn’t believe that the ice blocks would last long enough to get where they were going, even though they were covered in sawdust to keep them from melting.
I remembered that several summers before we moved to Ashfield, I was visiting my aunt Anna and Uncle Louis, who had a white refrigerator that looked very modern to me, but was actually an ice box. I was allowed to climb up to the loft where their ice was stored, all covered with sawdust.
It was July, and my cousin dared me to sit on a cake of ice. Dare taken, I went smiling down to the house, thinking how amazing all this would be to tell my friends at school — using the ice from the lake in everyday life.
Life in the country holds many surprises.