Snow Fun - by Rick

One of my favorite memories of childhood in Edmonton was ice skating in the winter. Winter arrived with the freezing over of every body of water, usually around early November and lasting through until mid April. Lakes, rivers, streams and ponds all froze to a depth of about a meter and drew us out of our warm and cozy houses for tobogganing, skiing, skating or ice fishing. Skating was my favorite.

I was around 6 or 7 when I got my first pair of ice skates as a Christmas present. My cousin Barry got his at the same time and Uncle Norman grabbed his and took the two of us down Mill Creek Ravine to give us our first skating lesson. We were about to become Canadians!

Now you probably have an idea of what ice skates are like but just in case you forget, they are like a pair of boots with something like a hedge-clipper blade bolted on to the bottom of the soul. You’re going outside remember so you have to rug up snuggly ‘cause it’s cold out there. You tie the laces of your skates together and string them over your shoulder so one skate is down your back and the other down your front and off you trundle to the nearest sheet of ice.

There you encounter your first challenge. The creek is covered in a foot of snow. So that’s why Uncle Norm brought a snow shovel with him. A few minutes later and he’s cleaned 20 or 30 meters of creek down to the ice and we have our rink.

Then our second challenge. You have to take your winter boots off and lace on your skates. This is not fun as you have to also take your mittens off and even on a “warm” day, it’s -10 to -20 and your fingers start to numb up instantly. But Uncle Norm shows us how to get the laces tight – they have to be very tight to insure that the skates are tight as tight can be on your feet so you don’t slip around inside them. You can’t skate if your foot wobbles inside the skate.

Uncle Norm is an expert and helps us get the laces to the proper tightness. The skates are an extension of our ankles.

Now for the hard part, the actual skating. If you have never skated on ice before, imagine something like walking on stones in a stream and they’re covered with slime. You’ve just discovered what “slippery” means. It means you fall down. Fortunately we weren’t very big and didn’t have far to fall. But we got up right away and soon managed to stay on our feet. Then Uncle Norm showed us how to push with one foot while letting the other foot glide. Then take the pushing foot, put it in front and let it glide while at the same time pushing again with the other foot. Then do it again and again. It looked so easy when Uncle Norm did it. But Barry and I were quick copycats and within a few minutes we were able to more or less skate from one end of the cleared ice to the other.

But we couldn’t stop! So we did the next best thing. We fell over into the snow, turned around, got back up again and skated back to the other end.

Over the rest of the holidays Uncle Norm taught us how to stop and how to turn. He shoveled out more of the creek and we were soon zooming back and forth and before we knew it, we could do an entire afternoon without falling. We were two young Canucks who had just gone through one of the most important rites of passage of our youth. We were now skaters!