Melting Ice and the Shape of Life (or, "Ice Ice Baby")

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.