Ice Skating

Ice Skating in America

In spite of the best of intentions, you never quite wind up where you think you will. I have spent a lifetime learning this lesson over and over again. I realize that there are worse lessons to have to re-learn; at least this one doesn’t involve a rock.

When the word, or rather, the words, came from that irredeemable blue green land of improbability, an image immediately came to mind and just as immediately it was discarded. And why was that? I could spend a lifetime trying to figure that one out. It could be due to a pathological stubbornness that some have said was genetic. Or it might have merely been my father. I asked him about the topic during one of our monthly visits and he spoke instantly of his father. I was startled by his response because there was something almost synonymous about it. And as he briefly described the arc of his father’s grace on those now nameless inner city ponds, I was aware that I was missing – or at the very least, had missed – something important.

But whatever the reason, I began writing of my second thought, which, of course, had to do with summertime.

In the summertime, we would learn the fundamentals of the American game on the unforgiving diamonds of an ancient park on the southern side of town. But in winter it was transformed. That gothic, always-locked clubhouse, was open then. The long wooden benches stacked in corners that we could see through the windows in the long hot days, were then neatly arranged in good Lutheran rows on the thick concrete floor. And the dreaming fields it overlooked were flooded – perhaps by firemen, perhaps by God – until the baseball nature of the place was erased, until the backstops blended into the leafless trees they so resembled, until our very enthusiasm for balls and bats seemed inconceivable, and the place was finally reinvented and reimagined as if by Brueghel, and we took our places in it like the tiny fifteenth century characters we are.

I can see us there. My god! We seem caught as if in a bird trap, in layers upon layers of wool and cotton and god knows what other fabric spun from the sweat of climates that knew nothing of ice skates, or of that pain in the front of your shins that you carried in those first days of winter. Look at us! Scurrying and laughing as our Nordic parents and grandparents had done for decades on this continent and for how many Viking centuries before, across the frozen wastelands of Europe and beyond.

And you have to ask yourself why. Why winter sports at all? Why leave the warmth and security of hearth and home for the merciless cold? Why, to all those ancestors, back through countless heartless winters, across countless frozen ponds and lakes and rivers. Why? Is it as simple as the simple love of movement? To push off, like some great Viking longship, and with strong legs and the deep breathed balance that comes of composure, to glide with a grace that clouds memory with its resemblance to flight.

Or is the enjoyment of contradiction at its root? The thought that those tiny tiny edges are somehow carving toe holds in the ice, and that all your weight, all your size, all your mass, is balanced precariously on a fraction of a fraction of an inch. And not merely balancing! But propelling you, arms pumping or hands clasped elegantly behind your back, crossover, crossover, crossover, as you turn in your wide effortless arc, moving faster on this frictionless miracle than you would ever dare dream on solid, simple ground.

I don’t know. Probably none of it. I know that for my father, he merely reveled in the cold. Whether it was the simple repetition of shoveling snow, or the wild exuberance and enthusiasm he had for skiing – the falling of the mercury ignited something in him that he would admit, but be hard-pressed to define.

Which is why, like my father before me, my thoughts of ice skating turn to my father. But not, ironically, to that crowded floodplain of my youth. No. When I think of him ice skating, I always see him on a shining pond of Olympian proportions where a light shines down benignly from a goose island. He would go out there, late late late on those bleak nearly-New England nights, by himself and carve endless circuits. And as I lay in my bed in my house on these gentle New Jersey plains, it is through shallow breaths that I can now recall laying in my bed in my room at the far corner of another house, and hearing through my open windows the breathing of the pines and the simple cutting and scraping of my father gliding effortlessly and alone along the steely edges of those restaurant skates as Orion watched over him and sighed. And as I do, I marvel again how we never seem to wind up where we think we will.

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