An avid ice skater, I did not want to face the prospect of a winter without my favorite sport. In light of the pandemic, I didn’t think it prudent to spend hours inside crowded indoor arenas, so I built my own backyard rink.
The day before the 2020 Winter Solstice, I enjoyed the fruits of my autumn labor. It was a little slice of heaven. For a couple of all-too-fleeting hours, I danced under a powder-blue sky, forgetting all about work, the pandemic, politics, entitlement, oppression, greed, pollution, and all the other anxiety-inducing issues that seem to colonize the consciousness from day to day. For a couple of hours it was all lightness, bliss, and balance. (And an incessantly runny nose.)
Later that evening I recorded a bit of bass guitar to accompany the video. All in all it was a good day. Here’s to the return of the light.
Building the rink
Building the 24-by-48-foot rink was almost as fun as using it. I started making the structure—essentially a shallow above-ground pool—in November of 2020, using plywood side-boards that I sawed from larger sheets. (Each 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet of plywood yielded three 8-foot-by-16-inch boards.) I purchased brackets from NiceRink, to hold the boards upright and keep them from pushing outward. Then, just before the first hard freeze, I lined the rink with a large sheet of white plastic, and hired a pool-water truck to fill it.
