Frozen Water, Warm Memory
I am an early riser. In the dark winters of New England, I am up even before the sun, and that, you’ll agree, takes some doing. But though I am up, I am, usually, not about. Venturing out before the neighbors have had a chance to shovel the sidewalks is unwise, I’ve discovered, and I don’t bother getting out before 8 AM. In my South Indian hometown, Chennai, getting a head start on the day made practical sense because the sun could turn the outdoors into one giant oven, well before noon. Strangely, that land of three seasons – hot, hotter and hottest – once benefited directly from the frigid winters of Boston. It received a precious cargo of ice.
In the latter half of the 19th century, ships carrying crystalline ice went from Boston to select tropical ports, including Chennai. The blocks were hewn out of the many frozen ponds that dot our New England landscape. In the 1830s, Frederic Tudor, “Ice King,” had found the perfect insulating material for this precarious cargo: sawdust, a waste product of Maine’s timber mills. The ice survived the four-month voyage to India and arrived gleaming and improbable at the equator’s edge. No museum in New England exhibits the paraphernalia of the frozen water trade, ice-harvesting tools, as its centerpiece. Nor will you find prominent plaques by the sources of frozen water – some like the Fresh Pond Lake are reservoirs now – to remind us of the fantastic voyage of packed ice.
Except for a wedding cake of a building in Chennai called the Ice House, there is no other surviving architectural remnant of the trade either. The structure went up in 1842, when the city was called Madras. The British ruled India back then. The building has, of course, been remodeled extensively, but because of its location, right opposite the Marina Beach, you can easily picture loin-clothed workmen dragging ice across that wide road on wooden rollers. The trade declined by the 1880s with the rise of ice-making plants and mechanical refrigeration.
Currently, Ice House is a publishing office and is named Vivekanada House, after an illustrious Indian thinker. But ask an autorickshaw driver to take you to the Ice House and chances are he won’t swear at you for calling it by its non-Indian name. Though he doesn’t speak English, has probably never heard of the frozen-water trade – local textbooks don’t mention it – chances are, he will take you there without a fuss. It is a minor miracle how the place name lives on in the city’s collective memory, two centuries later.
Though I like to visit my hometown briefly in the winters, nothing will make me budge from New England during the summers. In those warm months when the sun doesn’t go down till late, I walk around Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. When he stayed in the log cabin as an experiment in simple living, the philosopher must’ve created his own water supply from thawed ice or by melting snow. Of the ice trade, he’d written: The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. To others it may be nothing more than a forgotten bit of commerce, but the journey of ice does appear extraordinary to me, connecting as it does my two hometowns in such an unexpected way.
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—————————— —————————— —————————— —————————– This essay is part of an anthology of essays inspired by New England. The book was published by Paige M. Gutenborg, the book-making robot/espresso book machine, at the Harvard Book Store.
This essay is featured in The Drum Literary Magazine for your listening pleasure.From an old article in Scientific American:… that the commerce in ice but recently commenced in the “burning climate” of India and the Indian Archipelago, has already become to the United States, who principally carry it on, one of their most lucrative articles of export. In a climate the temperature (which is almost constantly from 26 to 28 degrees of Reaumur, they have ices ; they drink ice! champaign in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Batavia, Manilla and Canton , where the alcarazza was lately the only refreshment in use .) To give some idea of this new equatorial commerce and its importance, we need only mention one house in Boston which in a single year has sent to Asia 101 vessels with cargoes of ice, which have yielded eighteen millions of florins. This is almost as much as the product of the whole wine harvest of Bordeaux.