The Magic of Ice
In the warming room at Boomerang Creek, the smell of a fire in our Buck Stove is comforting. The calming scent of herbs wintering over in a south-facing window fills the room. I’ve just read an AP news article: “Snow, ice disrupt Spanish lives.” Storm Filomena—a 50-year record blizzard—has paralyzed large parts of central Spain. Over 20 inches of snow were dumped on the Spanish capital of Madrid where our son and his family live. Hayden and our granddaughters Inés and Catalina described snow drifts turning to ice as temperatures plummet. Images of Inés ice skating in a blue costume as a teenager surfaced. And from my own past, thoughts of ice suddenly fill my mind.
I don’t remember when I first saw ice. Born in a city named Hot Springs, I lived the first decade of my life in southern regions of Texas and New Mexico, thankful for ceiling fans, Dr. Pepper, and swimming pools. If there was a season called winter, I don’t remember it being much different from every other season of the year.
My first real encounter with winter came in 1955 when our family moved to western Massachusetts. It was a world of summer tobacco barns, truck farms, and deep snows in the winter months measured by the height of drifts piled up against our clothesline.
Down the slope behind our house there was a broad, grassy commons. During my first winter in that cold place, I discovered that landscapes could be transformed. By January, parents were eager to empty their living rooms of children bored with winter confinement. Overnight, with the help of a fire hydrant and freezing temperatures, the dull winter grass disappeared on the surface of the commons and became the most beautiful outdoor ice rink a child could imagine.
My granddaughter, Ines skating in Madrid.
As I recalled learning to ice skate when I was ten, I heard a voice on the radio announce winter weather prediction of rain turning to ice by late afternoon. Paralyzed by the mention of ice on the roads, I pulled up a lap blanket and let my mind wander once again far beyond the boundaries of the world outside our windows.
In that place one goes to prolong the warmth of dreams, I found myself in a scene from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that lay east of a range of impenetrable mountains. The author describes the setting of the story as “the world so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Though I read this novel more than three decades ago, I re-entered the village on the edge of sleep as Colonel Aureliano Buendia was remembering that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. New inventions came to the remote settlement each March when a family of gypsies set up their tents near the village. One year the gypsies brought a magnet, calling it “the eighth wonder of the learned alchemist of Macedonia.” The following year, they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass “the size of a drum, exhibiting it as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam.”
Each year, the arrival of these gypsies who wandered the world in search of ingenious inventions excited the imaginations of the villagers, and most particularly the father of Aureliano. On the occasion revisited in my dream, the father and son had just paid thirty reales to enter a gypsy tent advertised as having belonged to King Solomon. At the center of the tent was a pirate’s chest guarded by a giant wearing a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle.
When the chest was finally opened, it gave off “a glacial exhalation” and the amazed father and son see an enormous transparent block inside. They are certain it must be the largest diamond in the world—a gem “with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset is broken into colored stars.”
“No,” the gypsy announces. “it is ice.” Needing to understand the mystery of ice, the father and son touch it and are filled with both fear and wonder. Startled, Aureliano withdraws his small hand immediately and cries, “It’s boiling.” Convinced he has seen a miracle, the boy’s father exclaims, “This is the great invention of our time.”
“Ice…. Sheets of it,” repeats a voice on the radio, early the following morning. Outside, the world at Boomerang Creek had frozen in the night. Once awake, Kit and I bundled up and cautiously set out with trekking poles from the house to our walking path. Frozen pasture grass crunched under my feet. Not a squirrel, rabbit, or bird has stirred from its winter shelter to greet the dawn.
When ice cometh, it can come hard and fast on the land. But when revisited across time, it is as yet a soft, transparent memory filled with needles of light and colored stars. It is a surface on which my granddaughter once danced on ice in Madrid. And it is where I travel back to my own childhood and the backyard in western Massachusetts where I first discovered the magic of ice.