I’m not up to speed, as they say, on the customs of other cultures but I do know that if you are a man who wants to be a good father and you have the misfortune to be a Canadian, you are sentenced to three months of hard labour every winter …
Building backyard skating rinks.
I wonder what an alien would think, flying over my place at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning, to see me “tromping” snow – back and forth, back and forth – trying somehow to gather enough of the fluff to form a hard-enough pad on which multiple applications of water might harden into an ice surface. Would he-she-it, or whatever gender aliens are, think I was performing some sort of mating dance or a religious ritual?
Or would they think I was simply insane, as I was beginning to diagnose myself around the time when I could no longer feel the ends of my fingers.
A “good” dad’s worst enemy is his mouth, or more precisely, his inability to control what comes out of it.
“Hey guys, I’m going to build you a skating rink!”
“Yay!” comes a enthusiastic chorus from the mostly motionless couchbound forms busily at work at the controls of various video-game machines. Once uttered, the declaration cannot be rescinded. A father who pronounces and does not deliver is a pretty poor excuse for a patriarch.
In late November, the first of many trompings began and within a surprisingly short period of time, something resembling a sheet of ice began to emerge from our backyard field of snow. Soon, out came the skaters, up went a couple of old hockey nets and on Christmas Eve, all four members of the family were sliding blissfully along, under the glare of a couple of spotlights mounted on a post and to the seasonal music emanating from a radio there. Somebody should have taken a photo. We would have made a great postcard. We had even sprayed blue and red hockey rink lines and circles on the ice. Our joy was complete, my reputation as Number One Dad intact.
But on Jan. 5, our own little ice palace began to crumble, as a heat wave struck. In our part of the world, it is known as the January Thaw. One last skate that morning and then the deathwatch began. Five days of increasingly warm temperatures, complete with rain, wiped out all our work. Our blue and red lines now were left streaked pitifully across our grass like poorly applied makeup.
“I’ll build it again!” uttered my ever-troublesome mouth before I could shut it and another chorus of Yays! went up. Thus the 1 a.m. tromping.
This time, however, there was barely enough snow to make a pad and so I had to strip all the snow off the rest of the yard and throw it on the rink. But a cold snap followed and hour after hour of spraying and carrying a frozen hose into the house to thaw, brought the rink back to life. On Jan. 20, 15 days after we last skated, and the anniversary of the day I was born, our blades once again touched down. This rink was as good or better than the last. It was my own greatest birthday present to me.
This week, the first one in February, it turned mild again and rained. Grass began to reappear but just in time, the temperature dropped and we were back in business. However, as I write, I see a forecast for rising temperatures this weekend.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll build it a third time if I have to.” Darned mouth.
And guess what?
I had to.
(Update 2019: Our rinks were built for 10 years from 2007 to 2017.}
©2008 Jim Hagarty
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