The Veal Ice Tree: A Multi-Generation Indiana Winter Tradition
Below is a transcript of our interviews with Janet Veal-Drummond and her daughter Wynter Hawk:
Janet Veal-Drummond: Describing the ice tree is so difficult for me. It just touches your spirit in a way that nothing else does.
Wynter Hawk: When people visit and they see the ice tree in person, they say, “This is like nothing I even imagined.” It's taller, it's bigger, it's more beautiful. Pictures don't do it justice.
Veal-Drummond: In 1961, there were five kids in the house. My parents had a home office, and they thought, “Let's get the kids out of the house so we can work in peace.” There was no snow on the ground to make a snow hill. So my dad goes, “Well, let's make an ice hill!” So he started spraying the hill [with water]. When the wind shifted that night, it blew the water onto the honeysuckle bushes, and it froze and made this beautiful pattern. His personality was to make it bigger, better, more fun. That was my dad. So that's how the ice tree started. My dad passed away in July of 1973, and between all of us kids, we kept going until the third generation was ready to start ice tree building.
Hawk: I was never able to meet my grandpa, but because of the ice tree and what he created, I feel like I get to be a part of what he was doing. I feel like I get to meet him in that sort of way.
How the Ice Tree Is Built Each Winter
Hawk: We typically start this tree with the water running when 30 degrees hits consistently for more than seven days. Before that, we'll build a frame and we'll just sit and wait. We get the water from our pond and there's an in-ground pump in the pond. We're using what nature has given us, and it's a spring-fed pond. When this ice melts, it just goes straight back to the pond, and in the summertime, we build a water slide.
The hoses don't freeze up because under pressure, water doesn't freeze. If we can keep these going constantly until the end of the ice tree season, it won't freeze. These hoses run all night, all day. We never turn them off so that we can just keep this water going.
I have many roles in maintaining the tree. My main role is being an ice tree builder, which means that I need to be in charge of making sure all of the hoses are placed where they need to be placed, getting branches from trees that need to be trimmed around the property and then placing them on the ice where I know that I want to grow the ice, and make the ice tree taller.
We climb it, take our hatchet, hack away what we need to hatch so that we can keep a climbing route. Then we'll take the branches, we’ll climb up, place those at the top of the ice, and then if we need to add a hose to what's up there, we'll add a hose to make that hose taller.
I climb the ice tree without getting hurt by putting these spikes on my boots. That really helps to grip it, but it's still so slippery. Sometimes I'll have these on and I'll slip and fall. I'll also take my hatchet with me. I will hatchet the ice to kind of break it up, make it more like a powdery, snowy effect, and then that makes more of a grip so that I can climb it.
Adding Color and Artistic Touches
Hawk: Normally we can get it to about 30 to 45 feet tall. If there's a longer stretch [of cold weather], we'll get it taller. This is average for what we are used to for building.
I really like to make sure that there are beautiful icicles in the front of the tree, and we don't make our climbing route in the front of the tree because when people come, we want to make it really beautiful for their pictures or videos or whatever they're wanting to do here.
We have a fourth generation. Her name is Athena Hawk, and that is my daughter. A week ago, she got to color the ice tree for the first time. We add color because it brightens it, and it makes it look beautiful. It's another way that we can be artistic with the ice. We've found that everybody who comes to see the ice tree really, really likes this color. If there's not color on it and people are visiting, they ask us when we’re going to color it.
This year's ice tree was so much better than I imagined. I'm really happy about how tall it is this year and how wide it is and what it looks like. I wish we had more time to keep building it taller, but I think it went really well and I'm going to miss it so much.
Veal-Drummond: We keep up the ice tree every year because it's a part of us now. It's what feeds our spirits. The years that it's too warm to do it, I feel like it was a waste of winter.
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The above video is a clip from Journey Indiana from WTIU. You can watch more segments and full episodes at pbs.org/show/journey-indiana/
