Ephemera

Skating Backwards

I spent yesterday afternoon doing something I hadn’t tried in a very long time, ice skating outdoors on a pond. When I arrived at my niece’s tenth birthday party she was playing hockey with a bunch of her girlfriends and a few boys like it was the most natural thing in the world. I envy kids who get to grow up doing that regularly in Canada. The small cove was surrounded by trees and a few other lake houses and it looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

I was eager to use my new hockey skates which I had recently bought after years of wasting hours searching for rentals during weekend trips to Vermont and Canada. It felt great to have my own pair again, even if they’re doomed to spent the rest of the year gathering dust in the knee wall as part of my growing collection of outdoor gear.

So I skated out to meet the kids, declared myself an honorary member of the girls’ team, and tried to play a little defense.

While cruising around the ice I noticed one of the girls was using a small white hockey stick with the large initials “ML” carved into it on both sides. It was my old Koho stick from when I was a kid. I hadn’t seen it in a few decades and I had completely forgotten that I ever had a stick of my own. It was shorter than I remembered, and needed some black tape around the blade, but otherwise it was in fine shape. My Mom laughed when I recognized it and told me she had dug it out of their basement along with a bunch of old hockey pucks. I think every toy my sister and I ever played with is still down there somewhere.

I was about my niece’s age when I tried to pick up hockey after spending countless afternoons skating at the local rink. By that time I was much smaller than other kids in my class and well behind everyone else when it came to hockey skills. I could skate as well as anyone, but I wasn’t thrilled about waking up for 5:30am practices so I eventually gave it up and moved onto other things. If I had to do it over again I would play hockey every chance I could get.

Once I was out there everything came back very quickly. There’s something about holding a hockey stick that makes me feel comfortable and balanced on the ice. I skate better and focus more on where I’m going than how I’ll get there. The same type of confidence can transform downhill skiing from a reckless act of survival into the surreal experience of effortlessly gliding down the face of a mountain. It can be very rewarding to reach that level of proficiency in any hobby.

The kids eventually retreated inside to have hot chocolate and I lingered on the pond under the rapidly darkening sky. I skated to the untouched far end of the cove and marveled at how the ice there was almost as smooth as the area my brother-in-law had hosed down the night before. I was wearing plenty of layers to keep out the 10ºF chill so I just stood there on the ice for a while and listened.

Behind me I could hear the sound of laughter coming from the house. In the distance beyond the trees a train rumbled across a small bridge on its way south from Portland to Boston. I visited that bridge last summer and competed with several members of my family to see who could drop into the water most gracefully using a nearby rope swing. I can still feel a few of my worst belly flops.

If I had spent a few hours on my own at some remote New Hampshire pond I might have become uncomfortably aware of my lack of company. I can probably handle being alone better than most people, but there’s a fine line between solitude and loneliness. With my parents and my sister’s family nearby, however, the experience was nearly perfect. Even though my surroundings were beautiful, I learned long ago that it’s the people that make experiences memorable, not the places themselves.

I blinked and realized that I couldn’t see my skates anymore. It was time for me to go back inside and rejoin everyone.