Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Hotel de Glace
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
My parental alarm sensors are pulsing bright yellow, tinging towards red. Wherever my kids are, they have been there longer than I can handle.
My pre-teen daughter Brittany, her teen brother Ben and I are on a winter holiday at the Hotel de Glace, an hour outside Quebec City. It is the North America’s only ice hotel, spa and resort.
The Hotel de Glace—sculpted, carved and erected from 40,000 tons of ice and snow—is an igloo on steroids. It sits next to a small slope with beginner skiers, families of tobogganers, snowboarding teens —all slipping and sliding towards a gentle stop near the hotel patio.
Within minutes of arriving, the kids insisted on exploring the campus without their hovering father who, they vehemently agreed, cramps their style. For touring an ice hotel, I have no clue what that means, but Brittany pleaded, “Dad, I’m almost a teenager” as if Ben’s teenager status somehow qualified him for unsupervised trouble.
As their snow boots crunched away on the snowy path leading to somewhere unknown, I was left behind in a vaulted room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling made entirely of ice. Hanging ice chandeliers scatter light and ten-foot-tall ice sculptures glisten.
I run my fingers across a block of ice topped with a fur pelt. Shivering at its glass-smooth coldness, I realize it’s a chair. I remain standing, stomping in place.
My search-and-rescue operation begins by poking in and out of fifty sleeping rooms arranged along four snow-white corridors. In each bedroom, the walls are carved with intricate ice designs, backlit with eerie, ghostly blues, purples, reds, yellows and greens.
I check out the ice chapel, then over to the ice slide. The grand hall, also assembled from ice blocks, echoes with the care-free laughter of families—the older kids holding the mitten-covered hands of younger siblings.
My kids could be anywhere. Lost children, abducted children, frozen children. Right now, my teasing about them turning into human popsicles seems unfunny.
The once majestic mountainscape appears ominous, foreboding. As the sun recedes, the once bright white snow is graying. Night is coming fast.
The panicky voice in my head rehearses a phone message to my wife. “Dear, the kids and I are still at the Hotel de Glace. They’re having a wonderful time. Don’t worry. In the spring when the ice melts, I promise we’ll find them.”
At the ice bar the house specialty is a champagne, gin, limoncello cocktail poured into a cube-shaped glass made of clear ice. Perhaps a few drinks will make me feel better about losing a child or two.
Tapping into eons of encoded father wisdom, I post up near a small wooden shack selling maple taffy. Hot maple sap is poured over a bed of ice, then rolled up on a stick to make a cavity-extracting lollipop.
My nose and ears are nearly frostbitten when my two future college tuitions appear, cheeks rosy red. They’re sharing an amber wad of maple candy like nothing, nothing at all, could possibly be amiss.
"Dad, you have to try this!" Ben exclaims. Brittany chimes in, “You should have seen the scary ice monsters.”
“I did, I did,” I assure them, my teeth chattering and my heart melting.
