I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they’d cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.
This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.
My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.
I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It’s only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it’s only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I’d ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.
I’ve never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I’ve seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they’d break right through if they tried.
These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that’s totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.
i remember being up at lake tahoe (california-nevada border, USA. big freshwater lake) and the firm my dad worked for, one of the owners had a cabin up there. They were trying to convince my dad to buy into the practice so as part of his bonus one year (I was like, 4) we got to stay a weekend up there. tried to jump over a frozen creek, I was 4, fell through the (ice was a quarter inch, water was 6 inches, i was 4 remember) 12 foot hole in the ice to my watery grave. I spent (probably a second at longest) twenty three years, submerged (up to my shin at most? i really don’t remember), underwater, in that hole until my dad plucked me out, a grown man (yes all it took to turn from a 4-year-old to a fully grown adult, then man, because amab and i hadn’t done a lot of thinking by age 4, was getting my feet really fucking cold. truly i was a king among cold-feeted cold-feet-people.)
At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that’s a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.
As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it’s a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he’s dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it’s kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.
And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.
yeah, we got enough snow out here that it stuck to the fence once while i was growing up, and it was the weekend we were moving and we were in the damn truck during the hour it snowed. we had warm winters.
i got ice and cold as an adult (my first winter as an adult was in Utah), but i think it has a different effect on you as a child.
I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they’d cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.
This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.
My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.
I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It’s only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it’s only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I’d ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.
I’ve never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I’ve seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they’d break right through if they tried.
These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that’s totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.
are they doing the thing again?
i remember being up at lake tahoe (california-nevada border, USA. big freshwater lake) and the firm my dad worked for, one of the owners had a cabin up there. They were trying to convince my dad to buy into the practice so as part of his bonus one year (I was like, 4) we got to stay a weekend up there. tried to jump over a frozen creek, I was 4, fell through the (ice was a quarter inch, water was 6 inches, i was 4 remember) 12 foot hole in the ice to my watery grave. I spent (probably a second at longest) twenty three years, submerged (up to my shin at most? i really don’t remember), underwater, in that hole until my dad plucked me out, a grown man (yes all it took to turn from a 4-year-old to a fully grown adult, then man, because amab and i hadn’t done a lot of thinking by age 4, was getting my feet really fucking cold. truly i was a king among cold-feeted cold-feet-people.)
At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that’s a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.
As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it’s a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he’s dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it’s kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.
And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.
yeah, we got enough snow out here that it stuck to the fence once while i was growing up, and it was the weekend we were moving and we were in the damn truck during the hour it snowed. we had warm winters.
i got ice and cold as an adult (my first winter as an adult was in Utah), but i think it has a different effect on you as a child.