In an effort to break away from the onsetting cabin fever and actually enjoy the Minnesota winter for a brief moment, I convinced my daughter and her friend to throw the skates in a bag and head out to Wayzata for a little afternoon time at their large outdoor rink.
For a Minnesotan, skates are merely an extension of the feet.
Skating outside is a mainstay in Minnesota. I’ve had my share of indoor skating (in a climate controlled rink with smooth, flat ice) and it doesn’t hold up to the real thing. I cannot even recall how young I had been when I first put on a pair of skates, but I do remember that there were always an available pair tucked back in the closet – either too big or too small – since I had two older brothers who could pass down their well-used gear.
Small skates meant thin socks, cold toes and sore feet. Big skate meant extra socks, lace-wrapped ankles, and sore feet. Yet as a kid, any discomfort was easy to ignore during a game of tag on the ice with the neighborhood friends.
Evidently, teenagers no longer appreciate pictures taken by their Dad.
Growing up on a lake in Minnesota meant that donning skates and heading out the back door was just as natural as breathing. We’d usually need to spend the first 40 minutes with a shovel in-hand trying to clear a rink. Since this happened after school during the short days of winter, this also meant that we’d have to turn on a spotlight from our boathouse to see the fruits of our labor and were always skating well into the dark of early evening.
The size of the rink was always a function of how much we could tolerate before dumping the shovel in the snowbank and just enjoying the skates. After clearing the snow from the ice, it was always a crap-shoot regarding the condition of the ice we would find under the snow. We’d always start the clearing at least 50 feet from the shore, since the ice near the shore was simply too rough to enjoy skating. Out further, we could at least find a few patches of smooth ice, but would inevitably encounter some major cracks that would result in some harrowing skating. The worst kind of ice to find was where a thin ice layer sat on top of a hollow pocket (due to thaw/freezing cycles) that would result in the skates breaking through and tripping you up. All of these conditions resulted in training your balance to encounter anything with skates on your feet.
Caribou Coffee knows just how to market to a Minnesotan
Today’s skate wasn’t quite so bumpy, as the folks in Wayzata do a nice job with flooding a large baseball field with ice. I wouldn’t be surprised if they would have run a Zamboni at some point after the first flooding. It’s not “indoor smooth” but I didn’t need to give too much thought to catching my skates on a bump/crack that might put me on my butt. What started with less than ten people when we arrived at 1pm, turned into nearly 100 people when we left at about 2pm. Temps near 30deg were just right for an afternoon at the outdoor rink.
We capped the afternoon off with another Minnesota favorite – hot chocolate at Caribou Coffee and home for some homemade chicken soup.
This is what we are supposed to do in Minnesota during our long winters and gives us the experiences to tell stories when we get older – although my daughter will never understand what it takes to make her own rink.
