In From the Chilly | Down East Journal

Text and Photos by Greta Rybus
From our February 2026 subject

At the top of our street in Hiram is a farm market the place we purchase eggs and produce each week. It’s quiet inside: no audio system enjoying music, not even the low hum of fridges. Usually, a person sits on the small counter and reads a guide till it’s time to tally our purchases and take our money or verify. The store sells greens, meats, jams, baskets, furnishings, and do-it-yourself cleaning soap. Some days, there are recent hand pies or doughnuts. When I seize a carton of eggs from the built-in vertical cooler, chill air rushes out. The cooler’s temperature is regulated by stable blocks of ice, harvested annually from the beaver pond within the woods between our street and the Amish neighborhood. 

Around December, our Amish neighbors begin monitoring the pond, slicing a small gap within the ice to gauge its thickness. When it reaches a few foot, the time is correct to name a piece bee, when Amish households come collectively to sort out an enormous venture. The ice harvest, like different issues that want doing locally, is organized by the Work Bee Coordinator. “Individuals tell him about projects that need to be accomplished, and he looks at the different needs and prioritizes them,” one neighborhood member informed me. “Then he announces a work bee at a certain location, and as much as we can, we all gather and help each other with the work.” 

In thick boots and hand-sewn coats, a gaggle of males head out previous the scrub brush and snaggly timber that line the sides of the swampy shore. Where the ice is large and unbroken, they use a steel body fitted with a chainsaw to slip throughout the ice and reduce lengthy strips. Then, with spiked poles and steel tongs, they hoist the ice in sections roughly 10 toes by one foot, setting them on the stable floor of the pond and slicing them into 12-inch blocks. 

It’s a frenzy of principally guide exercise because the ice is reduce, lifted, reduce once more, and stacked on horse-drawn sleds, the mechanical thrum of the chainsaws a kind of acoustic anachronism. When I talked to neighborhood members about their selective use of contemporary equipment, one mentioned, “You would find differences in different Amish communities, but we can use most things with simple motors.” It’s not not merely a matter of permissible and prohibited applied sciences — it’s in regards to the shared worth of working collectively. “We’ve seen what happens if you even go into the car world with all the different technologies, it kind of seems to us everybody goes their own way and does their own thing. We would say there’s a lot of value to working together.” 

There are eight households within the Amish neighborhood in Hiram, and over the 2 days dedicated to ice harvesting final winter, they got here out to assist. Just a few non-Amish households parked their minivans close by, typically watching and typically pitching in. I solely discovered the harvest was getting underway as a result of we skate on the far finish of the pond, and we had been on the market shoveling snow to maintain the floor clear. The Amish, too, skate within the winter, and their kids play within the surrounding woods in the course of the hotter months. 

When I shuffled throughout the ice with my digicam, there was a little bit of negotiation about find out how to seize the harvest. I agreed to keep away from focusing an excessive amount of on one particular person, hold a respectful distance, not ask anybody to pose for a photograph, and prioritize documenting the work course of. “You would get varying opinions on photos,” I used to be informed. “It’s mostly the way we’ve been brought up. It goes back to the Bible passage about graven images. We find a comfortable middle ground to respect people who would like to take pictures of us, but we also know that images can be a distraction from God.” 

I additionally agreed to omit names from captions and quotes. They wished this to be a narrative about members of a neighborhood all pulling in the identical path. With that settled, I used to be warmly welcomed. As a sled laden with ice blocks was hauled off the pond, I hopped on the again with a teenage lady. She identified the farm fields, the greenhouses, her house, and her college. Her father informed me what a very good author she was, how she had received a composition contest at college. She helped him arrange ramps to slip the ice off the wagons and into the chilly storage on the market. Subsequent hundreds went to the households’ properties, the place most have small icehouses or electrical fridges outfitted to accommodate ice. Packed tight, the ice ought to final many of the yr. If one ice home or cooler runs out, ice shall be reallocated from one other. 

During the harvest, one neighborhood member impressed upon me that he noticed the work as a part of his worship. “In the very beginning, when God created the world, He said, it is not good that man lives alone. That aspect goes into community life, church life. God intended that people come together and work together. If people start being by themselves, they have ideas that will allow them to drift away. Working together is an aspect of worship. We help each other with our physical work. We have more interaction. And it does affect our spiritual aspect as well.” 

Every carton of eggs I purchase from the market incorporates a photocopy of a hand-written observe from a member of the Amish neighborhood, often embellished with kids’s drawings. It’s a brief dispatch of musings and goings-on: a narrative of when a horse obtained unfastened and ran by way of the neighboring city of Cornish; the author’s admission that he likes skunks although they’ve stolen eggs from his farm. One observe included a point out of his neighbors skating, the profitable harvest on the pond, and iceboxes readied for the various months to return.

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Publisher, Down East journal