Ice Blocking
For the first time in a long while, the activity known as ice blocking came to my mind this morning.
I’ve not done it since college, which is just about 10 years ago now. I figured it popped into my head because I’m seeing the close friend that introduced me to this “sport” this evening.
In short, ice blocking involves sitting on a roughly a phone-book-sized chunk of ice and sliding down a grassy hill. Think of it as sledding without the snow. I learned later it’s mostly a West Coast thing and is pretty popular with high school and college aged kids in California.
I was introduced to it almost immediately in my freshman year of college thanks to two adventurous Eagle Scouts I shared my first dorm building with. They were collecting others to join them on a particular evening, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to the group.
I have so many fond memories of ice blocking with these two, who would go on to become my best friends at college. We’d regularly stuff the freezer in the shared dorm kitchen with Tupperware filled with water to create the ice blocks. Attendance at our ice-blocking “events,” if they can be called that, surged and waned over my four years there. But it was always us three.
I’m distracted, to be honest, writing about it now because it’s sending so many memories flooding back. Hours of time spent bundled up in multiple layers against the biting cold of the ice itself. The thrill of sliding down grassy hills, some perhaps to steep for our own good. The ceremonial smashing of the ice blocks after each outing and warming ourselves by the dorm’s shared fireplace after.
Ice blocking, it seems, means much more to me than a fun time had in college. That fateful first night of ice blocking led me to the two closest friends I would leave college with. Perhaps the closest friends’ I’ve yet to have.
But at the same time, ice blocking is bittersweet to me. I’ve stayed close with one of these friends, even being honored to have him as best man. The other, however, has fallen away. Due in some part to his own actions and to mine, we’ve lost touched and not spoken in almost two years. I cannot look upon the way things ended with him and not feel regret. Funny that an activity as trivial as ice blocking has brought this up. The human mind is a crazy thing, isn’t?
