Warm Memories Are Enough to Put Misgivings on Ice

When you’ve grown up in Massachusetts, people in other parts of the country expect certain things of you. One is that you will say “pahhhk the cahhh” on request, so they can laugh as though it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard since Reaganomics. Another is that you know how to ice skate.

Neither, of course, is necessarily true.

Where I grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts, near Cape Cod, we did ice skate--often, in fact--on the ponds and cranberry bogs. The bogs were especially ideal for skating because when they’d be intentionally flooded in winter, they’d make near perfect outdoor rinks--smooth as glass and only a foot or two deep, so you’d almost never have to worry about thin ice, drownings or Zamboni accidents.

We’d spend many an afternoon there, first shoveling off the snow to make our own Boston Garden-sized (we thought) hockey rink, then trying vainly to put the puck between the goal posts (actually somebody’s hat and jacket). Never having had a skating lesson, and usually equipped with unsharpened, musty skates that had seen too many basement floods, I wasn’t exactly Bobbi Orr or Peggy Flemming.

Still, we did have a whole lot of fun, as I recall. And it was that recollection that I held dear as I headed over to Ice Capades Chalet in Costa Mesa one recent Wednesday night.

Though I hadn’t had a pair of ice skates on my feet in easily a dozen years, I figured it would be like riding a bike--or about as much like riding a bike as any of the other things people tell you are like riding a bike. In truth it was more like riding a bike on ice.

Since the only pair of skates I own is collecting mold samples in my mother’s New England cellar, I gathered my size 4 1/2, Kelly green, plastic-coated rentals from the counter at the rink and proceeded to the nearest bench.

A word of advice: If you like your ankles even a little bit, buy your own footwear before attempting this ice skating thing. The skates they give you here are not only garish looking (available only in comic-book colors) but also really, really uncomfortable. A little bubble on the outside of each hard-finished skate is (I’m assuming) supposed to make room for an ankle. Trouble is, if your foot isn’t constructed exactly as the skate expects, your ankle won’t fit into the hole and instead will get mashed into the side. I knew I was in big trouble when my ankles began throbbing before I’d even left the bench.

But, seeing as I was here to skate, I shoved my shoes and pocketbook into a 50-cent locker and headed toward the ice. (One more aside: When I was a kid, we never spent money on lockers at skating rinks; we just traded off our shoes, making cleverly mismatched pairs that wouldn’t be as easily stolen, then dropped them into any little cubby hole we could find. Several decades later, I noticed some kids still shun the lockers. The shoe-switching thing seems to have been a fad, though.)

My first full step onto the ice--the one after I’d released my white-knuckled grip of the boards, I mean--was a doozy. I don’t know that I expected to glide right off toward Olympic gold or anything, but I sure as heck didn’t expect my feet to act as if this was molten lava I’d asked them to navigate.

A few uneasy seconds went by, during which I actually contemplated grabbing hold of a passing skater just to get up to gliding speed. I teetered, I wobbled. I searched my brain for any assurance that it remembered how to do this. I wobbled some more.

Right first, then left? Did the toes go out or in? Maybe the blades were supposed to come up off the ice. It occurred to me then that my knowledge of this sport might have gone unused long enough to have been spiked from memory--replaced by some far more useful and adult bits of information, like the recipe for fat-free bean dip or all the lyrics to “Phantom.” In any case, I knew I’d better think of something. Fast. Before some 6-year-old in Day-Glo kneepads and helmet mowed me over.

Ultimately I threw caution to the windchill and just went for it, trying anything I could think of to get a rhythm going. I pushed off with my toes and leaned unsteadily on the edges of my skates, then glided with both feet, making the kind of squiggled parallel tracks you see on signs for curved mountain roads. I leaned back, nearly wiping out completely, and leaned forward (better). I held my arms out like a tightrope walker for balance.

And next thing I knew, I was skating. I’m not saying it was pretty or anything, but I was definitely moving forward around the inside oval of the rink. I know this because my shins were screaming.

It was shortly thereafter that I discovered the crouch position. By bending low, I found I could ease the stress (read: pain) on the front of my legs and improve my balance to where I was able to get up some speed. Then, before I knew it, I was taking the turns skate over skate and working through the backstretches with my arms and legs paired in pumping rhythm.

At least, that’s what it seemed like. In reality I probably was only slightly more in control than Dan Quayle at a summit meeting, but at least I felt calmer, cooler, more relaxed.

An old joke passed through my mind: What’s green and skates? (The answer, of course: Peggy Phlegm.) This was actually starting to be fun.

Then the Zamboni showed up.

Zamboni--I’m guessing it’s Italian for “let’s turn this place into a puddle”--is what they call the machine that washes the ice during skating intermissions. It does this by sweeping up the ice chips and dumping a layer of water over the entire rink. I don’t think you have to be told how thrilling this makes the first few minutes of post-intermission skating.

With my ankles rubbed raw and my confidence rapidly ebbing, I probably should have quit while I was ahead, but the wet ice presented a fresh challenge, so back out I went. Not so much skating as hydroplaning at this point, I dared not trust the edges of my blades to guide me through the turns--I took them straight on, like a toy horse on wheels being pulled by a toddler. I kept speed to a minimum and stuck to the inner circle of traffic, where the water seemed to be evaporating quicker. Balance was a thing of the moment.

As I remember it, back when we skated the bogs, the afternoon seldom ever was called for anything but darkness. When you no longer could see a slap shot screaming toward your eyes, we would play another half hour and then go home. Here, indoors, I knew the darkness wouldn’t save me, so I called it quits on my own.

Back at the lockers, I unlaced my skates and anticipated the familiar “ahhhhh” of donning comfortable footwear again. It easily may have been the best part of the evening, if not for those skate-over-skate turns. And the satisfying rush of wind against my cheeks at full skate. And the addictive “clack” of blades against the ice . . .

Still, anybody know a place where they grow cranberries out here?