Winters Past: Recent Episodes
Isaac Kestenbaum / Josie Holtzman
Winters Past podcasts will transport you to the way winters used to be. But you'll have to get out of your chair first: these podcasts are all designed to be heard while outside, while walking.
Stories about the forgotten trade of ice harvesting, singing lakes, Model T Fords, a toboggan club, and a mechanism known as "The Endless Chain." Also C3P0 and R2D2 from Star Wars show up.
We're lucky to have a guest for this walk—Ann Guenther, an experienced naturalist, will take you on a journey through winter, pointing out the little things that you might otherwise overlook. For this walk, you should go outside. Any place where you can walk for about 7 minutes and experience winter.
The Everywhere Soundwalks are a series of short walking quests to find winter—winter the way it is now, the way it used to be, and the way it might be in the future. For each short walk you'll be asked to find a certain environment or location: A pond, the woods, a hill or a bench. This walk is meant to be heard at a pond, or a lake, or a skating rink. Go anywhere where there’s some fresh water and a little bit of space to walk.
Once the fastest vehicles on the planet, ice yachts drew thousands of spectators to the frozen Hudson River. Hear the stories of the hearty few who carry on this tradition.
I recently spoke with a scientist at the Cary Institute who has studied climate change, who shared with me what he sees as a harbinger of warmer winters — inflatable snowmen.
Will this be the future of winter? Will it exist only in simulations and symbols? In manufactured snow, in store window displays and inflatable snowmen?
On another recent excursion we went to Bantam Lake, where we researched the Berkshire Ice Company. The company built one of the largest ice plants in New England on the shore of the lake—a structure as big as two football fields, that could hold 75,000 tons of ice. During the summer, trains full of ice ran daily to New York City.
A fire destroyed the ice house in 1929, but it took two years for all the ice inside to fully melt.
Recently we visited with Bren Smith, an oysterman and kelp farmer based out of the Thimble Islands. He had a lot of really interesting thoughts about the future of our oceans and of wild food. Check him out and support his kickstarter here: http://www.thimbleislandoysters.com/