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By Root 514 0

and railroads, which carried ice to cool rooms, frost drinks—and, of course, to preserve and ship food. By 1842 railroads were experimenting with using ice-filled cars to ship fish. Exactly twenty-five years later, one J. B. Sutherland received a patent for a refrigerated train car; cold air sank from huge overhead ice blocks, driving out warm air and cooling the contents (the same basic idea had been used in home refrigerators since the 1820s). Ice let prairie chickens reach New York in frozen barrels and oysters reach most everywhere. It brought fresh milk to cities from the countryside—replacing that from urban “swill dairies” where cows had been fed on whiskey mash—and enabled large-scale brewing of beer. Maybe the biggest changes were to beef; after Gustavus Swift built a line of icehouses to supply refrigerated cars, beef butchered and packed at the Chicago stockyards replaced the bruised, battered meat from live cattle that had endured the long trip from the Midwest. By 1885 Swift was shipping some 292 million pounds of beef along the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Until the advent of large-scale ice factories, all this ice came from winter or the mountains, and one of the first things the Virginia & Truckee Railroad shipped after its 1872 completion was “Sierra ice.” Cut from the Sierras’ ponds and lakes and loaded into cars just north of Tahoe, much of the ice was used in the Washoe mines, lowered to the bottoms of shafts that could otherwise reach 140 degrees. But much more of it cooled refrigerated train cars, allowing the shipment of trout, game, and—most important—produce back east. Sierra ice helped to shape California; without it the state’s Central Valley might not have become a dominant source for lettuce and other vegetables until decades later than it did.

Much of the ice was for shipping food; more ended in champagne buckets from Chicago to New Orleans (ice, in Louisiana, was as much a long-distance product as a California orange). But I absolutely love the fact that the only drink Twain lists on his menu is ice water, America’s “single specialty.” Thinking of him drinking until sated, then drinking for sheer pleasure until his throat went numb, makes me feel nostalgic—weirdly nostalgic, considering it’s for something a century before I was born. It’s just nice to remember that sometimes ice water, on a hot day, is as good a drink as there is.

HOW TO MIX ABSINTHE IN EVERY STYLE

Plain absinthe: half a sherry glass of absinthe; plenty of fine ice, with about two wineglassfuls of water. Put in the water, drop by drop, on top of absinthe and ice; stir well, but slowly. It takes time to make it good.

—LAFCADIO HEARN, La Cuisine Creole, 1885

In the decades after Twain left Tahoe dams sealed off mountain spawning runs, and surrounding rivers and lakes went murky from mining and logging runoff; in the 1920s pathogens from newly introduced species of trout caused huge die-offs. The last Lahontan cutthroats disappeared from the lake by 1940, and they aren’t likely to return anytime soon; in 2003, the UC Davis Tahoe Research Group said it would be more effective to concentrate restoration efforts on lakes with less human impact. Today Lahontan cutthroats are nearly gone from the waters that once froze into clear Sierra ice.

But north of Carson City, across sixty miles of what Twain believed to be a desert of only the “purest, . . . most unadulterated, and uncompromising sand,” lay Pyramid Lake, a body of water nearly as large as Tahoe. And Pyramid Lake’s tomoo agai—the Paiute name for the Lahontan cutthroat’s winter run—were the biggest trout in the world, bigger even than Tahoe’s titans. Before the Truckee River was straightened, its flow dammed, trout from Pyramid followed it through a hundred miles of desert and mountain, climbing thousands of feet until they came at last to Tahoe and its inlet tributaries. In Twain’s day some of the trout in Tahoe came there only to spawn; some hatchlings remained in the surrounding streams only long enough to attain a safe size before returning to Pyramid. Before the