FRANKENMUTH, Mich. — "It's cold, you're out under the stars, you’re working together, sharing tools. It’s going to melt ... there's a zen quality to it.”
A smiling beard with a man behind it named Ohio Charlie is saying this while holding a trophy with the Buddhist Om symbol forged on top. He just won it from a world class snow carving competition.
The Om Award is a spirit award. Naturally.
And the winner is its own natural selection; determined by the prior winner, who they feel best exemplifies the spirit of the snow sculpting community.
He is explaining who is at play and who isn’t in his team’s 1-story tall ball of yarn with a cat and a mouse on top. Ohio Charlie (Charles Schreier, a licensed engineer from Cleveland) exudes and embodies everything that makes the Zehnder’s Snowfest and its 34 years of ice and snow carving competitions a unique mesh of art and sport and — as mentioned in many different variations by nearly all competitors — a spiritually connected community bonded of arduous trial to offer futile effigies of joy.
There are astronauts, dragons, refrigerators full of food, comic heroes, fantasy landscapes, looming owls, and a hollowed out shark with crystal ice teeth and eyes leaping over a pier.
All snow.
And they all kind of have this frozen alabaster bandes-dessinees cartoon style.
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“It’s an art,” said sculptor and judge Kari Mac behind clear fluorescent orange heart-shaped glasses, and an orange-camo winter coat that was somehow even brighter. “But I don’t know… my arms hurt real bad, and I did not sleep at all. 24 hours of carving.”
To say these snowmen shamans love it is to describe only the edge of the vapor making the atmosphere of the world they’re in.
Buffalo Wild Winds Preserve
The first in a travel series that highlights day trip type activities from the Toledo area, providing side-quests and dinner recommendations along the way.
©Toledo Blade
FREMONT, Ind. — The American bison is an animal to be felt, more than observed or described.
Not touched, but to emanate with.
There’s a lot of good living in life that needs you to be close to experience it.
The electric air at the center of a docile buffalo herd conceals its thunder in hundreds of fuzzy, 2,500-pound bells that you can feel vibrate without ringing.
“They could get out, of course,” said Dan King, general manager of Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve about 90 minutes west of Toledo in Fremont, Ind. “They choose not to.”
On an education-first preserve with more than 400 acres of rolling prairie, the soupiest and most exquisite mud a bovine could pine for, natural spring water, and seven separate pastures in which the animals are rotated in pristinely curated freedom, the inherent intelligence of this worshipped, sacred animal is ever on display.
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