The Lake Winnipesaukee Ice Run: Smuggling Kegs by Sled Across the Frozen Lake

It is January at Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, and Barnaby, my black bear, ought to be asleep in his straw like a Christian bear rather than rattling his chain beneath my window. His breath could etch glass. I have quieted him with threats concerning his teeth, trimmed the whale-oil lamp, and set a jar at my elbow whose contents I decline to name. Tonight, reader, I take you out upon the ice.

A Road That Charges No Fare

Winnipesaukee is the largest lake in this state: seventy-some square miles of water, better than twenty miles from end to end, lying north of us like a great blue hand somebody dropped among the hills. You will be told it holds three hundred sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year. That count was made by a man who had been drinking on every one of those days. Count them sober and you will come up short and disappointed, which is how most things look sober.

From May until the freeze the lake is a water road. The side-wheel steamer Lady of the Lake has churned it since about 'forty-nine, carrying summer folk and freight between Alton Bay, the Weirs and Wolfeborough. Come December she is tied up at the wharf like a fat alderman, and until spring the ice does her work for free. The ice charges no fare, keeps no manifest, and has never once in its life spoken to a revenue assessor.

Ever since Mr. Lincoln's men took to counting every gallon this side of the Potomac, a man wishing to move a few kegs north to the lumber camps, the island farms and the thirsty gentlemen of Meredith has wanted a road without tollgates or eyes. So he waits for the cold. From Pittsfield you go north along the Suncook, up through Barnstead, over the hills to Alton, and down onto Alton Bay at the bottom tip of the lake. From there the country is open, flat and white as a dowager's bedsheet, all the way to anywhere.

The Arithmetic of Ice

The ice is not a road, however. It is a living thing, and it has opinions. Treat it as you would a new still: put it to the test before you trust it. The old ice-cutters, who do not guess, gave me these figures. Under two inches, stay off it entirely. Four inches of good clear black ice will hold a careful man on foot. A horse with a loaded keg sled wants about a foot of clear, hard ice. White or milky ice, or ice with snow lying upon it, wants twice that, for white ice is half the ice it pretends to be. Snow is the worst liar of all. It lies on the ice like a blanket, keeping it warm and soft beneath and hiding every rotten patch like powder on a pockmark.

Moving water is the other enemy. Wherever a brook comes in, wherever a spring rises from the bottom, and above all wherever the lake squeezes through a narrows such as the channel at the Weirs, the ice stays thin, gray and rotten even in a thirty-below week. A springhole is nothing but a skin stretched over a grave.

A runner therefore carried three things. The first was a sharp-shod horse, with steel calks set upon the shoes so the beast could grip. A calk is a molar for a horse's foot, and I have forged a thousand of them. The second was a long ice chisel, which we call a spud, for tapping ahead the whole way: good ice rings, and bad ice goes thunk like a melon. The third was a rope for choking his own horse.

A horse that breaks through will soon thrash itself to death, its legs going under the shelf and its head going down. The ice-harvesters learned to loop a rope round its neck and haul it tight. The horse stops fighting, the breath swells in its chest, and it floats up high like a bloated cider bladder. The team on solid ice then heaves it out on its side, and the instant it is out you loosen that rope, before you have saved it straight into the grave. It is the kindest strangling a creature ever got. A man who goes through must let the first gasping minute pass without drinking the lake. He then has only minutes before his arms turn to cordwood. He should go back the way he came, onto ice he knows held him, get his arms up on it, kick his legs flat behind him like a frog, slide out on his belly and roll away. He must not stand until he is a long way off, for standing is exactly what the ice is waiting for.

The Wettest Lawman in Belknap Country

I took to the ice myself the winter of Lemuel Fogg, a Barnstead man with a nose like a corn auger who had promised three taverns he would inspect my still-house for the gentlemen in Concord. He came over my woodpile at midnight, trusting the bear to be asleep. A January thaw had woken Barnaby hungry and out of temper, and the bear came away with the seat of Lemuel's britches. I stitched Lemuel up on my anvil by lantern light with dental silk, and he has sat sideways in church ever since. Still, a man who has been bit is a man who will talk.

So my kegs went by the ice road. I had a sled built with wide runners to spread the weight, and on it six kegs lashed under salt hay, drawn by a patient gelding named Deacon who was sharp-shod on all four feet. We went up through Barnstead by night, down onto Alton Bay at the gray of morning, and out across the Broads toward a gentleman on the Gilford shore whose lumber camp was full of thirsty men.

Out came Constable Hiram Dodge of Gilford at a gallop on his little bay mare, waving a paper and calling halt in the name of the town. I had tapped my spud the whole way and gone wide of the springhole off Rattlesnake Island, where the ice never sets right. Hiram took the shortcut to justice. The mare went through, and Hiram went over her ears like a sack of meal off a wagon, then came up gasping like a landed pickerel. I am a sinner but no murderer. I threw him the keg rope and Deacon dragged him out on his belly like a seal hauled to market. Then I choked out the mare, and with Deacon and two ice fishermen I hauled her onto good ice. When I slacked the rope she sneezed, stood, and looked at me as if it were all my fault, which it was.

The constable's mustache froze and snapped clean off when he sneezed. In the fishermen's shanty his trousers stood up by the stove on their own and looked more like a lawman than he did. I gave him two drams, purely medicinal, from the very kegs he had come to seize, and by the second he was singing and calling Deacon his brother. He never took me to court. To swear to the kegs he must swear to the drams, and to swear to the drams he must confess to being drunk on duty in a fish shanty without his trousers. Of the two I saved, only the horse has thanked me.

A Revenue Man's Ledger of the Ice

My guest that evening was Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, a retired federal revenue officer who spent twenty-eight years tracking copper through these hills. He is fair to an old-timer who builds a clean pot, though he will still look in your woodpile. He once chased an ice boat out of Meredith Neck, built in the Hudson fashion with a plank cross, three runners, a tiller and a sail. His men lost it on horseback for three weeks. The smuggler was too cheap to buy canvas and had laced his wife's red flannel petticoat to the mast. One moonlit night the wind blew it inside out, red as a barn. The Captain waited on the point, and when the wind died the boat coasted up to him like a sleigh to a church door. The prisoner grieved less for his kegs than for the explanation he owed his wife.

Near the Weirs an ice-cutter packed blocks two feet thick in sawdust, each one chalked "lake trout." A February search turned up nothing. In June the blocks melted and five-gallon kegs bobbed up from the sawdust like apples in a tub. He had cut hollows, set a keg in each, and flooded them with lake water so they froze solid. Nobody finds a keg inside a block of ice in February, but you cannot fool the summer. The Captain fined him and respected him while he did it.

On Moultonborough Bay one fishing shanty smoked like a locomotive. Inside, an old man had a pot still on a sheet-iron stove, with the condenser worm run down through his fishing hole so the lake cooled it for free. It was clever engineering and poor physics, for the stove's heat sank the shanty a little lower every week until the old man sat in water to his shins and supposed the lake was rising. The Captain's report read: "Defendant's premises have self-confiscated."

On the same bay in another winter, the Captain went after a sled on foot, crossed a pressure ridge onto ice as gray as an old dishrag, and went down to his chin. The man he was chasing turned his sled, threw him a keg rope, let the horse drag him out, wrapped him in a blanket smelling of sweat and mash, and gave him two drams. Two weeks later a bill reached the Bureau, itemizing one wet rope, one ruined horse blanket, and two drams administered medicinally for one dollar. The Captain paid it from his own pocket and never chased that man again.

Cider, Jacking, and the Apple Palsy

First the law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is history and education. Cider was the drink of New England before any corn saw a still north of Boston, and our grandfathers had a winter trick with it called jacking. You set hard cider out in the January cold, pull off the ice as it forms, and what remains is applejack, made without fire or copper. That is no gift. Freezing removes water and nothing else. The methanol, the fusel oils and every harsh volatile the still-man would have cut all stay behind and grow stronger. The old folk called the result the apple palsy: a headache like a turnkey twisting your skull, the shakes, and worse for a man who made a habit of it. Freeze-jacked cider is like a Belknap County politician, because once you take out the water, what is left is the same poison, only stronger.

Fruit is the greater hazard here. Apples are full of pectin, which breaks down into methanol in the fermenting, so a fruit wash makes more methanol than a grain mash. The cider-brandy man must therefore cut his heads with more care, not less. Grind and press a mix of sweet apples for sugar, sharp ones for bite and a few bitter crabs for backbone. Put the cider into barrels scalded clean, with no ghost of vinegar left in the wood. Ferment it in a cool cellar rather than a freezing one, because the yeast sulks in the cold. In two to four weeks it will go dry and still, leaving a wash of a few percent. Rack it off the lees so you do not scorch that mud in your pot.

The Experiment at the Worm

Make a stripping run first: fire the copper pot gently and run everything off as low wines without fussing over cuts. Then charge the low wines for the spirit run, fire low and steady, and set out a row of small jars rather than one big crock, which would let the bad mingle with the good past all separating. Throw away the foreshots. On a big charge I pitch a full quart or better. The heads follow, and you will know them by a cobbler's glue pot, turpentine, and a sting up behind the eyes. Set them aside. When the smell turns clean and soft and the apple comes back, sweet as an orchard in September, you have reached the hearts, and those are your brandy. Last come the oily, cloudy tails with their wet-dog stink, which are kept to go through again. A man in a hurry who runs it all into one crock keeps the coroner busy in spring.

Copper, the true metal of Venus, eats the sulfur stink from the spirit, but it does its work only where the vapor touches it: the helmet, the neck, the arm and the first turns of the worm. A pot that is copper only at the bottom does far less. Think of the vapor as the patient and the copper as the dentist, and put them in the chair together. Keep your fire low as well. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat hunting for your firebox. Keep the spout and jars well away from open flame and the joints tight, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door, and never leave a running still to step out for a pipe.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is potash, the lye of your grandmother's soap hopper, and it is alkaline. It might knock back a hair of vinegar sourness. Methanol, however, is no acid, so the ash has nothing to grab hold of, and too much leaves a caustic, soapy taint. It will not clean a bad head, though it will get you halfway to soap. Red oak lends tannin, color and a woody sweetness, so three-hour-old liquor looks three years old. That is rouge on a corpse: it filters nothing and leaves the methanol where it was. As the Captain put it, "Color is a costume."

Do not trust the blue-flame test either. Good spirit burns pale blue, but so does methanol, and the old saw that lead shows a red flame is no test to bet your life on. A blue flame proves only that the liquor will burn, as will a widow's letters. The only true test is an honest cut made in a still with no lead solder and no salvaged junk near it. A fresh copper cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. goes to Rabbit, if the mails can find him. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low, and tap ahead with the spud.