Ice Skating – on the pond and in the woods

One of the best projects we did was putting in a pond.  We fish and swim in it in the summer and ice skate on it in the winter.  When our son was growing up I had the week between Christmas and New Years off work.  We usually ended up skating for 6 to 8 hours a day.  My wife would often come out for a couple of hours but most of the time our son and I played hockey, or at least our version of it.  We would scrape the snow off to make a rink and put our boots at the ends for goals.  When you do not skate at all and then go skate for 6 to 8 hours a day strange things happen.  After the first day putting on your skates is agony.  Your ankles are swollen and stiff.  After falling down as often as we did your whole body is sore and bruised. After about 15 minutes or so things start to get loose and off you go.  I could always skate the fastest but our son could turn better than I.  From when he was around 12 until when he left home the games were pretty competetive and by the time he was in high school they were knock down drag out battles.  It is amazing how spectacular the falls on ice can be.  One year my wife was drying my sons pants from the day before and he went to get them in his underware.  He had a entire hip bruise that was purple with a greenish hue.  Over the past 3 days he had probably fallen on it probably 20 times.  That was the end of the hockey for the year.  One time I slipped and the first thing to hit the ice was my face.  It split the skin above my eye and stunned me.  If you have ever seen blood spread in water or on ice you know a little goes a long way.  By the time I came around there was a 2 to 3 foot halo around my head and our son was getting excited.  It was shortly determined that stiches were nor required and my glasses could be bent back in shape so we finished the game.  I can only remember one time that anyone joined us.  A friend had heard me talking and he showed up one Saturday.  We were going at it and he did that thing that you can only do on ice where your entire body is suddenly 3 feet above the ice.  He sounded like a melon on concrete when he hit.  He ended crawling on his hands and knees the entire way to where his cat was parked and left.  Pond hockey is not for the faint of heart.

Part of our woods is low ground.  The trees are mostly soft maple and it has standing water for probably 8 month of the year.  Usually the water will freeze and as the water soaks into the ground there will be a suspended layer of ice about 1 inch thick.  We would have fun going back and walking on this.  You would break through.  It sounded great and on a sunny day as the ice fragments shattered and sparkled in the sunlight it was neat.  Every few years the ice would freeze 3 to 5 inches thick and then we could skate on the ice.  Ice in the woods is really different.  As the water underneath would soak into the ground the ice would sag.  Where ice on a pond is level, in the woods it would often vary by an inch or more.  There are lots of things sticking up through the ice in a woods.  Pieces of wood and objects that were floating in the water, stumps, sticks and a bunch of other things. If your skate hits one of these it usually stops and the rest of you continues on resulting in a face plant.  Where the game on the pond was hockey, in the woods the game was tag.  There are trees, bushes and little islands to dodge around all of which make tag fun.  You can be ripping along and grab a sapling.  This lets you make a right angle or better turn at top speed.  I could not go as fast as on the pond because of all the things in the way and our turning ability was evened out by grabbing on to things so the tag games were pretty close.  The trouble with grabbing on to something to turn was it took practice and that was when you were most likely to hit whatever it was that was sticking up through the ice.  There is a lot more to get hurt on when you fall in the woods.   We would walk back in our boots, build a fire – you always have to have a fire – and skate the day away.  It was so beautiful especially if it was snowing or a really sunny day that highlighted the frost on everything. I always figured it was like being inside of one of those little water domes that has a scene and fake snow in it. 

We would always keep a look out when we saw a garage or yard sale for ice skates.  We have a box of skates in the basement that go from a toddler with two blades to a size 12.  If you don’t care about color we can put you in skates.  As the grandkids get older hopefully we will be skating again.