'Real' skating is bottomless joy

Out & About, by Eowyn LeMay Ivey

The dry grass along the bank rustles in the breeze and the metal blades of my skates swish, swish, swish across the pond. The ice is like clear glass over a black void. When I bend over and look closely, I can see that the blackness is actually water, very deep water, that makes the pond seem bottomless.

As I kick off on my skates, I feel like I'm gliding across a windowpane with the night sky below me. Even though I know the 5 inches of solid ice is enough to hold me, that void beneath my feet makes my heart flutter. Don't look down, I tell myself.

Now this is ice skating.

When my daughter and I were in an Anchorage mall recently, she rushed over to watch the ice skaters in the arena. "Mommy, Mommy. They're skating," she said. It's true -- technically the children and adults were ice skating, most of them better than I can ever hope to, but to me it didn't seem like the real thing at all. They weren't bundled up in layers of winter clothing, there was no wind or snow, and there wasn't the thrill of looking down into the black depths of a pond.

I grew up ice skating outdoors on frozen lakes and rivers. A neighbor and I used to spend hours on Wolverine Lake, where the wind howled and the snow drifted in great mounds. Wearing our skates, we would fight our way against the wind as far as we could manage, then stand tall, open our coats like sails and let the wind push us across the ice as we dodged clumps of snow and pits in the surface that could trip us up.

Tired and warm in our snow pants and winter clothes, we would lay on our bellies with our hands cupped around our eyes and look down through the ice. We could see aquatic plants and pieces of grass floating in the water below us, water that seemed to fall off into a black nothing. Sometimes we swore we saw huge fish swimming beneath us.

When there wasn't enough time to go to the lake, I would comfort myself with skating on a homemade pond my dad made for me in the yard. He would build a temporary wooden border and then flood it with the garden hose. With the winter stars twinkling in the sky and the wind blowing over the spruce trees, I would practice figure eights and skating backwards.

For the past few years, I've been skating at a friend's farm, equipped both with a small lake and a pond. The pond froze early this year, earlier than most waterways in the Valley, and last week a friend and I gave it a try.

Laura and I made sure the ice was thick enough, and it was clear and strong, but still we stayed in one small cove, talking and skating. Every few laps we would loop a little farther out into the pond, but our swishes on the ice gave us away -- we never ventured out into the middle, even though the ice there was just as thick and strong. Somehow it seemed safer where we'd already skated.

"Wimps!" the guy who owns the pond teased us when we returned to my truck.

We didn't care. It had been a perfect afternoon, and our legs were tired and our cheeks were red. It was like we were little kids again.

This is the one good thing about a winter without snow -- it makes for terrific outdoor skating. Later this winter, maybe we'll bring the Coleman lanterns down to the lake at night and skate in their small circles of light. Inevitably we'll end up playing some makeshift games of hockey, with a few of us using birch branches instead of hockey sticks.

And when I'm worn out, I'll lie down next to one of the lanterns, cup my hands to my eyes and peer down through the ice into that deep, beautiful darkness.

Eowyn LeMay Ivey covers education and the outdoors for the Frontiersman.