An Inland Lake Ice Rink Odyssey

It's 54 degrees today. The sun has shone all day long and our dirt road has mostly melted. The world smelled like fresh earth reawakening on my walk with the dog. The air is pungent with decaying trees unearthed and thawing and what I suspect are carcasses doing the same. As I walked, I was thinking of our timeworn tactics for keeping mud out of the house. It's February 10th and I'm thinking of mud—not of ice skating.

Readers who saw my column in the March 2009 issue of Traverse, Northern Michigan's Magazine know that my husband, Neal, and I have spent much of this winter trying valiantly and alas, mostly vainly, to create and sustain an ice rink on our inland lake. The effort has been a consuming passion, one that has taken on rather a life of its own, or at least a meaning of its own. Snow, gale force winds, sub-zero temperatures, cracks, shifts, lake seepage. We've seen it all.

Actually, the rink looks beautiful today. It glistens as the sun shines on the soft sheen of water that rests lightly on its surface. It has not gone slushy...yet. But I'm not really falling for looks anymore. I've done that one too many times this winter. After the gale force wind and 8-degree days passed that I wrote about in my column March's Traverse, we got snow. There is no working on the surface of the rink in snow. We waited. A calm, 13 degree night returned, and we hurried down to the rink, blow torch, shovels and snow blower in hand. The rink cleared remarkably well, revealing that the good ice was still good and the crunchy spots were still crunchy—nothing that a good layer of water couldn't smooth out. We flooded it. The next morning, the rink was picture-perfect from the house. We asked our 12-year-old, Austin, to run down with his skates and check it out. He gave us a thumbs up as he glided over the surface of the entire rink. There were a few bumps, he reported later, but otherwise it was perfect. We were elated. That's not quite right. It was more just relief.

That night we invited people over to skate. Finally. A handful of men and teenage boys came to play hockey. The littler kids were quick to get their skates on and were flying about the rink as everyone else got ready. The first man stepped onto the ice and his blade broke right through. He tried to move forward but he broke through with every step. The whole half of the rink that had been crunchy had frozen with some kind of fragile, false surface that couldn't hold more than 100 pounds or so. With great resignation, skates were removed. And after a while, even the littler kids began to break through the bad half.

We skated on half a rink for a few days before the weather got too warm. The rink is an ambitious size: maybe 100' by 70', so half a rink isn't all that bad. And all the while we skated, I kept telling myself that this was a glass-half-full moment. It was a lesson in being grateful for what we had. I'd like to say I embraced that mantra completely, but the truth is, I never found my inner peace with all of it.

Now, in the sunshine, you would never know the entire rink wasn't perfect. The places where skates went through have filled with melting water and the entire surface appears glass smooth. The temperature is supposed to drop today and they are predicting snow for tonight. Too much snow before the water on the rink freezes means sure ruin. That is the perfect recipe for slush that freezes into the moon-like surface we most often see on our inland lakes. If the snow holds off long enough for the watery surface to freeze up, we may yet skate through February.

I can't begrudge the snow, though. In fact, I hope it snows 'round the clock. The VASA is this weekend. The Winter WonderFest starts Friday night. There's the Empire Winter Festival, Glen Arbor Winterfest, the 3rd Annual Michigan Snow Run in Gaylord, the Jeep Terrain Park Challenge at Crystal Mountain...our Events Calendar is packed with winter fun this weekend. We have all assumed this would be the snowiest weekend ever for these wonderful winter events, but even the many feet of snow we've had can't completely fend off the effect of temperatures over 40. We need snow. These events will go on and, as always, they will be grand. With any luck, people will be tossing fish, polar plunging into freezing water and crossing finish lines through steady snowflakes.

But as I get the towel to dry mud off our dog Foxy, and leave my boots at the backdoor to dry as if it were April, I'm thinking maybe I should call a few people involved with these events and talk about not quitting, about glasses half full, maybe even bring up inner peace. And who knows what else? I suspect this ice rink has a few more lessons up its sleeve.