Five-Hour Drive (part 1 of ?)

Hartzell's Ice Cream in Bloomington, Indiana

“Hey, remind me again—how long is the drive to your dad’s place?”

“It’s about four hours, I think.”

“That’s kind of close to Hartzell’s, right? How long is the trip if we detour?”

“…nine hours.”

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There is a folder in my brain labeled “five-hour drive.”

Inside that folder lives a small number of things—maybe as many as a dozen.

They’re some of my favorite things on earth. They’re places and experiences which, I have found, I’m more than happy to go five hours out of my way for. Things where I have gone five hours out of my way, more than once, and been thoroughly satisfied every time.

I’ve been meaning to write about them for a while, and in the past week, I managed to revisit three of them. And since the phrase “five-hour drive” first occurred to me on the way back from my very first Hartzell’s trip, that’s where we’ll start.

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I.

Hartzell Martel is a demigod, or perhaps an ur-wizard. For a quarter of a century or so, he has been providing the citizens of Bloomington, Indiana with ice cream that is the equivalent of a fine wine, an expert massage, a four-star French meal, or a loving rendition of your favorite piece of music by a local university symphony. He’s been known to wake up in the middle of the night with sudden inspiration for a new flavor combination—Japanese cherry wasabi, or peppermint acai sorbet, or something called “The Garden of Good and Evil” which hasn’t been in season any of the times I’ve visited but which I am told contains lavender and vodka, among other things.

The ice cream is art. Unquestionably, unmistakably. Like much great art, it can be appreciated in passing, with half of your attention—there’s nothing wrong with grabbing a couple of scoops of strawberry ice cream and slurping it up absentmindedly as you walk the campus with a couple of friends. It will make your day brighter and sweeter, will contribute unobtrusively to a background glow of isn’t-it-great-to-be-alive?

But it also rewards a deeper attentiveness with a richer experience. There’s content there, under the surface, waiting to be perceived and appreciated.

Fresh Strawberry:

Tart, vibrant, alive like an electrical wire or a hose with water pulsing through it.  The strawberry flavor is fresh and bright, makes me think of county fairs, dairy farms, “real fruit” and “real cream” instead of supermarket blandness.

Bouncing balls and plastic toy dinosaurs.  Third grade summer camp.  This is sticky and cool and giddy and silly, leaping into the swimming pool after a long dusty hike.  The kind of hug where they pick you up off your feet and wave you around a little.

Hartzell makes all of the ice cream himself, and has never written down a recipe anywhere that anyone has been able to find.

(This was frustrating to me, since my first trip to Hartzell’s was the sole and entire inspiration behind what is now a proper ice-cream making hobby, and I’d already bought the machine before realizing I wasn’t going to have a set of guidelines to follow. I’ll begrudgingly admit that there was something valuable in having to find my feet without An Authority to look toward, but I still wish I knew how to make the lemon poppyseed cake batter flavor. I just … can’t get it out in California where I live.)

The about section of the shop’s site says that Hartzell’s explicit goal is to create “extraordinary and memorable experiences.” He is constantly tinkering and improving and experimenting. He wants people to be able to remember the exact taste of the ice cream hours and even days later, and I think he’s pulling it off—I’m fairly certain that Rainforest Ube, which I ate last week, is an iteration upon Purple Galaxy, which I tasted back in April when we visited for the eclipse.

Purple Galaxy:

WHAT!?

Styrofoam, sea foam dissolving, crackling fractal space, pockets within pockets within pockets.  What if an aero bar were an ice cream—not an ice cream with aero bars in it, but the aero bar itself is the ice cream, somehow.  What if freeze-dried space ice cream were somehow reconstituted and chilled and still just as crackly and foamy as ever.  Like being a dog and chowing down on a whole bowl of packing peanuts (or, less tragically, cheetos).

It doesn’t much TASTE.  It’s like fondant or sponge cake or the non-marshmallow bits of Lucky Charms.  This ice cream is almost entirely about the texture.  It explodes.  It shatters.  It crackles.  It sparkles.  It gives way at the slightest touch, like an ancient statue on Melpomenia or Jadis’s homeworld, crumbling to dust as soon as the hero reaches out toward it.  Ice cream of ancient fallen empires, ice cream of vast interstellar distances (I am primed, but rightly so—they made this ice cream on purpose).

Feed this ice cream to: a tree, giving it the brief and ephemeral power to walk, just long enough to move from one side of a field to the other.

Rainforest Ube:

Strangely bready, styrofoamy—at once light and bubbly and somehow crunchy.  If shortbread cookies were ice cream—not shortbread ice cream, but the shortbread itself magically transmuted.  

Soft, subtle, not super sweet.  Very understated compared to its bright purple color—this ice cream would have been right at home as a natural beige or a soft pastel green.

Wholesome.  Like lembas bread.  Someone could trick me into believing that this was healthy (or at least, as healthy as a loaf of bread).  A carpenter lovingly cleaning up his shop at the end of a long day shaving and carving and clamping and sanding.

I’m left feeling nostalgic, almost wistful.  Quiet evening ice cream.

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II.

There’s something terribly appropriate about just how unassuming Hartzell’s ice cream shop is. There’s absolutely nothing on the surface to distinguish it from any of thousands of other hole-in-the-wall boutique ice cream places all over the country.

It has the same glass-fronted freezers, the same five-gallon tubs, the same polished plastic countertops, the same staff of teenagers getting in a few hours of work between classes, supervised by one or two seasoned adults. It doesn’t buck the archetype. It is the archetype.

There’s something about this that feels right and good and proper, makes some part of me that I didn’t even realize was tense begin to relax. There’s something about pursuing quiet excellence within a tradition, rather than feeling the need to break that tradition, and be some sort of disruptor or contrarian. There’s a kind of self-hatred that pops up depressingly often among geniuses, a sort of resentful chafing at the bounds of their craft, and Hartzell just … doesn’t.

It’s an ice cream shop. He makes ice cream. And this calm, singular, unpretentious focus has resulted in damn good ice cream.

(I’m reminded, somehow, of the work of a master carpenter, quick and sure and offhanded and casual, such that it isn’t until later, looking back, that you appreciate all the thousand little considerations that went into the design, and the raw mastery behind the craftsmanship. There isn’t any flash and dazzle on the surface—all of the quality is inside, layer upon layer of thoughtful expertise.)

Ceremonial Green Tea:

This is the perfect color.  The same color as green tea cheesecake, the color of green tea in a white porcelain teacup on a sunny day. Smells almost grassy, like the underside of a lawn mower, a pile of decomposing greenery on the side of a cool, quiet creek. 

First bite—amazing. There is an explosion of flavor, instantaneously, as soon as the spoon hits my mouth, a burst of fresh green tea taste high in the back of the center of my mouth, like I have bitten into a green-tea gusher.  The vapors of tea absolutely fill my sinuses. There’s hardly any sweetness at all (appropriately so, as I imagine green tea and sugar would not go well together at all).

A tiny woodland creature, a squirrel or a chipmunk, flitting and skittering among the mulch and grass and leaves, skit-skit-skittering, alert and cautious, hungry and hopeful.  Dappled light, soft breezes, the whisper of a distant creek.  Extremely tranquil and yet with a central thread of wakeful aliveness.

It is somehow True to the experience of sipping green tea in a Japanese tea garden, while also still having the ice-cream nature. Ice cream for tempting a skeptical eight-year-old into figuring out how to enjoy tea. I think of Buddhas, herons, steppe temples, and realize that I’m back in the Japanese Tea Garden of San Francisco, trying to convince myself that an almond tea biscuit qualifies as a cookie.

It’s like eating a painting.

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III.

The first time I had Hartzell’s ice cream was with my spouse Logan (then fiancé). It was the summer of 2021; we were fresh out of lockdown (where we’d gotten engaged) and off to visit each other’s parents for the first time before moving in together in a new house in a new city. We took a detour to IU Bloomington, where Logan went to school, so that he could show me his old stomping grounds and treat me to Spinoccoli pizza at Mother Bear’s and (of course) ice cream, for dessert.

Logan hadn’t been home to Bloomington in years, but the ice cream had stuck with him. “The chocolate basil,” he said, authoritatively, and he was right.

Chocolate sweet Italian basil:

One of the few ones where I can actually get a smell at all before tasting.  It’s tough to place.  I know with my brain that it’s “basil” but just taking in the smell itself … it’s a bit green, a bit reedy … sort of evokes celery?  But like if there were an alpine celery, something cold and high and spiky.

First bite. Oh my god.  So rich, so immediately complex.  Thick, stretchy, dense, rich, like almost-cooked brownie batter as it comes out of the cup.  A sharp tang, almost knifelike, the basil thin and piercing without being particularly loud. My brain cycled through like five images in the first half-second, fur and fuzz and porcupines and pine trees and crackling campfires.  It’s brown and black all shot through with evergreen.  It’s an alcohol fire lit atop an ice cube, all dancing blue.  It is the badger-spirit guardian of the mountain forest, powerful and violent and judgmental (but fair).

This is the ice cream that makes me feel like I’m not fancy enough to appreciate it, like I am trying my absolute hardest to keep my elbows off the table and return the social graces.  I think of Aral Vorkosigan or Grand Moff Tarkin or Tywin Lannister, all the dangerous distinguished elder gentlemen one hopes to impress and fears to disappoint.

It’s fascinating to me that the experience has almost nothing in common with either basil or chocolate—there is a synergy, something full and new and subtle and deep. Does this even taste like chocolate?  A little, if I look for it, but it’s like trying to pull apart the instruments at the climax of the symphony.  You can do it, but it doesn’t get you anything.  What matters is the blend, the harmony.  The basil and the chocolate are perfectly balanced and alchemy happens and it makes a Third New Flavor that feels like One Pure Thing all on its own.

This is what a conifer forest tastes like, to a brachiosaur.  This is what you get if you transform a sequoia into a dragon.  There are three wizards and the blue wizard shoots a freezing ice blast and the red wizard fires off a searing lightning bolt and the green wizard strikes with a bolt of pure forest energy, all splintering wood and prickling needles, and this is what the green bolt feels like, and it turns you into a mole and you live happily in the forest ever after and that is the (surprisingly merciful) punishment for your crimes.

The second time I went to Hartzell’s was a few days later, even though the encore required a two-and-a-half hour drive, five hours in the car in total.

We went back because I’d only gotten to try two flavors, and spent the intervening three days joking (with increasing frequency) about how maybe we should go back, haha, wouldn’t that be silly, being the sort of people who’d drive five hours just for a few more scoops of ice cream, haha.

You see—

(sorry, this part of the story has several steps to it)

—back in 2019, my colleague Carson, who had previously worked in a chocolate shop, put on a dark chocolate tasting as a birthday present for another colleague, Colm. I joined in on a whim, thinking that the idea of a tasting was silly and absurd and fake (but hey, free dark chocolate!).

What happened instead was that I had a mind-blowing and literally life-altering experience that opened my eyes to both a) the astounding variation to be found between different bars of pure dark chocolate, and b) attentive tasting as a concept.

And it just so happened that there were leftovers—enough of each chocolate to recreate the experience I had just had. And it just so happened that I knew a guy—

(Logan)

—who I thought would deeply appreciate having that same experience himself.

(At the time, we were not spouses nor fiancés nor even friends, really; we mostly knew each other in passing and I had been completely oblivious to a couple of gentle overtures of interest on his part.)

And Logan liked it! Enough that, when we ended up in the same place during lockdown in 2020, we decided to do another.

And another.

And another.

And I dunno, relationships are complex, it’s hard to say exactly what goes into two people falling in love and deciding to move in together and start a family, but it feels like Tasting-with-a-capital-T was part of what brought us together, part of the glue that helped us form a bond with each other.

And here we were in 2021, meeting parents, planning weddings, trying to Figure It All Out, and in the meantime Logan had brought me to this place from his past, this ice cream shop of legend run by a mysterious reclusive alchemical master, and it was Logan-loving-that-sort-of-thing that made me fall in love with him in the first place, and there was this skill, this practice, this muscle that we had been learning how to flex together, that was woven into the very core and history of our relationship, and in the hustle and bustle of trying to move out from lockdown and get to Logan’s parents we’d only barely left ourselves time to grab the tiniest most cursory glimpse at the masterpieces that Hartzell had to offer and then we were gone, on to Madison, and after that, next stop Burlington, North Carolina—

And it just felt too sad, in a how-could-we sort of way, would we ever be this close again, what if we never came back through Bloomington, and rather than simply proposing that we go, like a grownup, I just kept making wistful half-jokes until Logan—

—who is an absolutely amazing partner that I’m incredibly lucky to have—

—helped me figure out that no, I actually was serious, I really did want to go, and away we went.

It was an incredibly sweet indulgence on his part, and the start of my policy of No, Really, Just Actually Go that has me writing this very essay from a hotel near Rock House, Ohio, and while there isn’t any neat, causal story about all of this being Important in our marriage, it feels like it is. It feels like the world where we went back is different from the world where we didn’t, and the world where we went back is the better of the two timelines.

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IV.

Of course, having instituted the policy of No, Really, Just Actually Go, I’ve now been to Hartzell’s four times, which allows me to do things like compare experiences of the same ice cream more than once:

Lemon Poppyseed Cake Batter (8/13/2021):

Canaries, Peeps, sunny spring days, birthday celebrations, poppyseeds slyly evoking sprinkles.  Like the absolute sweetest most delicious part of the muffin, a best-for-last bite of just the top with crystallized sugar streusel, held between your tongue and the roof of your mouth until it melts. 

This may be the happiest ice cream I have ever tasted in my entire life, with the bright vibrancy of an orange sherbet but also the thick belly richness of French Vanilla.  I think of nothing so much as a Putt Putt golf course visit with my summer camp, or the day my dad pulled me out of school to go to Celebration Station.  It’s loud and ecstatic and wanton, children running around shrieking at the top of their lungs and not a single person in earshot is bothered by it.  Licking the spoon, flour on your hands, parties by the lake, bouncy balls and trampolines.

(4/8/2024):

Oh wow, sharper than I remember.  Sterner.  Tarter.  This child has matured, is not particularly enjoying being a teenager, and has no patience for being treated as if they are still the same person they were three years ago.

The texture is pebbly (from the poppyseeds) and also … soft and rolling?  Hills of biscuit dough, piles of pillows.  Above it (or through it, maybe) there’s a high, piercing whistle of a note, that makes me thinks of birds a little.  But it’s more clarinet than flute—I’m also getting desert imagery—

Oh!  Pikachu!  This is Pikachu ice cream.  Like, not ice cream for Pikachu, but ice cream to represent him.  It’s lightning and cuddly mammalness at once, sharp and soft with electricity holding it all together.  Ice cream of rubbing balloons to build up static shock and make your hair stand on end.

Feed this ice cream to: a sunset, to soothe its passage into darkness.

(8/24/2024):

Pure joy.  Liquid sunlight bursting through a dam and pouring down into a dark valley, turning everything gold.

It tastes so very much like a lemon poppyseed muffin—the kind that’s soft as memory foam and encrusted with sugar crystals on top.  Where the Rainforest was pastel, this is Day-Glo—not bright high eye-hurting neon, but the sort of midbrightness neon with the saturation turned up to 110%.  Card stock for a middle school poster report on something rad like rockets or dinosaurs or Taylor Swift.

Where the strawberry one was going down a water slide, this is one of those giant swings or slingshots at an amusement park—so exciting you can barely contain it, the feeling of a thrilling mistake.  A four-year-old and his dog trembling in bed on Christmas morning, forcing themselves to wait until 6AM.

I tasted Hartzell’s in the summer before my marriage, as I traveled across the country with the love of my life.

And I tasted Hartzell’s in the aftermath of the eclipse, now a husband and a father and a homeowner and with gray starting to show in my hair.

And I tasted Hartzell’s last week, alone, as part of a sort of healing walkabout, and at some point in the future I hope to taste it again, and it’s fun to imagine what the circumstances might be—whether I’ll have my child with me, perhaps, and will delight and confuse them by (for once) letting them get as many flavors as they want and eat and eat until they’re full to bursting.

And I don’t know. There’s just something nice about knowing that there are places like Hartzell’s out there. Hidden gems of breathtaking wonder, that make you reconsider everything you knew about something as mundane and straightforward as ice cream, for goodness’ sake. That let you take a bite of ice cream and have a legitimately rapturous experience, on par with a spiritual awakening.

I didn’t have to be alive at the same time as Hartzell Martel. I could have missed it. I could have been born in a different century, or been dating a different person, or just have flown into a different airport that first time, one that made a detour to Bloomington unworkable. I wouldn’t even have known what I’d missed.

But in this timeline, I got lucky. That’s worth going out of my way for, every now and then, to celebrate.

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Appendix: Notes for a few more flavors

I won’t flood you with everything (I took a lot of notes), but there were a few other flavors that deserved a shout-out even though I didn’t work them into the flow of the essay proper.

Ceylon Cinnamon:

This is the most beautiful to the eye so far, speckled and mottled like soft, wet beach sand.  The smell is pure churros, strong and rich and fried-seeming.  Where the green tea was almost entirely in the aromatics and the taste on the tongue was quiet, here there are two separate experiences happening side by side.  The cinnamon floods the nose, while the tongue gets a warm, red, bready sensation. 

Like the coils at the Exploratorium, the warm taste and the cold temperature each drive one another higher.  I expected to think of cinnamon buns or cinnamon pretzels, or maybe more distantly gingerbread houses, but instead I am thinking of La Fiesta, a Mexican restaurant from my hometown where I incidentally never ate nor even saw a churro being served.  I find myself wanting to bite into it, as if it is a chewy roll of bread. My teeth chatter nervously.

Black raspberry:

My immediate and overwhelming experience is one of squeezing, like an hourglass, a choke point in the rapids, gushing openness on either side of a channel where things are purer and more pressured and flowing in straight lines.  The ice cream is pulling me straight down my own throat, a flavor that lives low and heavy in the back, down down down.

Intensely purple, exceptionally fae.  Velvet and thorns.  Old-school fairy tales with grim endings and MTG-green morals; you should not have strayed from the path, child. I’m certainly primed by knowing what raspberries are, but nevertheless: the image I get is of vines twining around an old, iron-wrought garden gate, the sort that feels like it might lead into Narnia.  I reach out carelessly and prick my finger on a thorn; a single drop of blood beads on my thumb and I lick it away. 

Alternatively: the room of the admiral’s wife, on the flagship; small, but exquisitely appointed, with a rich but spartan taste.  You are meant to feel inadequately dressed, no matter how well you prepared.

Alternatively: a thunderstorm rumbling outside your unsophisticated but thankfully sturdy wooden cabin, in the jungle.  Power, lightning, darkness, deluge.  Soft and forceful all mixed together.

Feed this ice cream to: a boy, in a dark and eldritch ritual that will mature him into a woman (he wasn’t trans to begin with; this is a curse, though it is more merciful than most)

Chocolate Lovers:

Deep.  Rich.  Substantial.  Ents, oxen, mountains, orcs.  The favorite ice cream of a giant, hulking lumberjack in leather boots and flannel whose voice is surprisingly soft and high-pitched.

There are sort of two layers to this one.  I’m not quite sure what I mean by that sentence, but the image I got was of a plastic sled sliding down a snowy hill, and a teddy bear on top of the sled, and somehow the ice cream is both of those.  I get a kinesthetic sensation of a line going from left to right, trending slightly downward, and an object atop that line.

It’s very chocolate.  “Chocolate Lovers” is definitely the right name.  Chocolate the way that a Wendy’s frosty is somehow more chocolate than a McDonald’s milkshake, chocolate like the kind of cupcake that costs $16 and is unfortunately worth every penny.

Wholesome and rustic and brown and warm, a cabin on a hillside in winter, a crackling fire and an old, wooden boardgame.  Family ski trips on a small budget, the time I went with the Zolayvars.  I’m getting quite full after six ice creams but it was still really hard to not eat every last drop of this one.  God damn.

LemOreo:

Note: I was about to try “Kung Fu Grasshopper,” but Jess-behind-the-counter, who has been my guide during this tasting-of-nine-different-flavors, vetoed and handed me this, which she had already scooped out and gotten ready when she saw that I was done with Chocolate Lovers.

WOW I figured this would be too similar to the Lemon Poppyseed Cake Batter to be worth it but this is Different.  Or, well, okay, it’s the same Guy but it’s like a different Mood?  I can still taste the core lemon base, which is excellent, but now instead of being giddy electric youthful joy it’s snickering mischievous trickster prank mud wrestling.  Swapping out poppyseed for Oreo (and losing whatever element is “cake batter”) made this dirty in the most glorious afterschool fashion. 

Scraped knees and dirt-caked fingernails and leaping out of trees shrieking at the top of your lungs.  Makeshift tomahawks, jumping dirtbikes, staying up until 3am playing MarioKart 64. 

This is the core central experience of presexual male friendship.  Marauding band of lost boys.  Blood brothers and secret handshakes and hidden clubhouses.  I realize I’m saying almost nothing about the ice cream itself but honestly my experience is dominated by the way it makes me feel, not by how it tastes.

lol, I forgot to get a photo. I just got swept up and carried off.

…and just for kicks, here’s the recipe for “Tickle,” the ice cream that I’m proudest of having invented, after exposure to Hartzell’s caused me to take up ice cream making myself:

8 large egg yolks

½ c sugar
¼ c light brown sugar
¼ c light corn syrup

1½ c raw heavy cream
1½ c evaporated milk + a splash of whole milk

3 tsp arrowroot starch
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 tsp orange extract
½ tsp cinnamon
1 tsp powdered ginger
¼ tsp kosher salt

Mix ¼ c of the evaporated milk with the arrowroot starch and set aside.

Bring evaporated milk, whole milk, and cream to a simmer, add in orange, ginger, and cinnamon.  Let sit for 1-4h.

Whisk sugars, egg yolks, and syrups until blended.

Mix the remaining evaporated milk and the heavy cream into the egg yolk, warm to 173ºF (making a custard).

Add in starch slurry, vanilla, and salt, then strain into bowl. Let sit in fridge overnight before churning.