I Only Have Ice For You...

It's the slogan of the Glacier Ice Company, purveyors of, well, ice. It's Snow Night in downtown Santa Cruz! While the rest of the country seems to be cleaning snow off the streets, we are giving snow-blowing a new meaning--27 tons of ice is being chipped and blown onto the road in front of the movie theater. The frosty area is fenced off with hay bales and chainlink, and accessed through a narrow archway of festive white balloons. It's free, but folks are asked to bring donations for the Food Bank. You get ten minutes in there, time enough to roll around, throw a couple snowballs and snap a few photos. It's only for kids, kids who have been waiting in line in the cold for quite some time, and excitement runs high.

We watched most of the installation process from a cozy seat in the window of a coffee shop right in front of the action (Decaf Sea Salt Caramel Mocha for me, and a simple espresso for Mr S). It was all very efficient and very very strange and funny. A semi filled with bags of ice backs up to the chipper; a crew of guys empties the bags into the hopper, which is noisy, and the guy on the ground wields a long blue hose and squirts the chopped ice back and forth to form a long snowbank. It's pretty crunchy; you sure wouldn't want to ski on it. I don't even want to walk on it since the surface is so slick. But it's a lot of fun to sit at a warm table and watch passersby try to scoop up some stray ice and throw it around. Everyone is snapping photos and laughing. Really a terrible waste of resources, but one that seems to make people pretty happy.