kssh, kssh, kssh

An ode to the backyard rink and what it means to me.

The creaking can be unsettling.

Yet, it’s beautiful at the same time.

If you’ve ever skated on an amateur-made outdoor rink or pond, you’ve probably heard the sound. A creak in every direction, the tension of human weight on frozen water, and the half-second fear that your foot is about to dip into chilling water below.

And, yet, if you’ve tested the thickness well enough, it stays solid. You skate on, the sound of skates on ice, “kssh, kssh, kssh,” against a silent backdrop.

Very much like life, it’s broken and solid at the same time. Thousands of tiny fractures hidden below the surface, somehow holding it all together even it doesn’t make any sense.

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It’s funny, because I didn’t grow up with hockey as a winter sport.

Growing up as a kid in the 90s in New Jersey, I fell in love with the sport in June and July. There was a summer recreation program, where elementary kids would spend hours each weekday morning playing highly-unorganized street hockey with teenage counselors watching over and pseudo-paying attention in an age before cell phones.

That’s where I discovered an odd love for having projectiles sent at me, I remember my first real “save” standing in front of the goal without goalie gear and diving to my right, the orange Mylec ball hitting my glove like it was a blocker.

From that moment, I was hooked on the sport, on the feeling of standing in a crease and doing my best to deny others.

Street hockey eventually led to ice hockey, but it wasn’t until I was in middle school, around 12, when I first played ice hockey and really learned to skate. I learned to ice skate in goalie gear at a “learn to play” hockey camp in Montclair, NJ, in goalie skates, too.

So even though I actually grew up close to a couple lakes as a kid, I never really had the frozen pond experience.

When I was in high school, now in Michigan, my parents got me one of those build-a-rink kits, the one with the PVC piping and the plastic sheeting, but it didn’t go well since it was effectively a dumb teenager trying to build a backyard sheet on uneven ground. Water went everywhere, it was more of a frozen puddle spread across the grass of our backyard.

The backyard rink always lingered in my mind as this romantic, but unsustainable dream. Unsustainable because my life took me to Texas after I finished college, and I lived there for close to a decade.

But when my wife, Christina, and I moved our family back to Michigan in 2021, a move to get closer to home, a flattish backyard was high on my wish list when we went house shopping.

We ended up finding a house that fit the bill, surprisingly so with what the housing market was at the time coming out of COVID, and with the encouragement of Christina, we built our first outdoor rink that December.

My daughter, then a 3-year-old, skated for the first time with me holding her up.

Today, now a 6-year-old, she twirled circles around her 4-year-old brother, and two family friends that we invited over for the first skate of the year. She’s often at her happiest on the ice, whether it’s in figure skates or hockey skates, and both she and her brother are well on pace to be better skaters than I ever will be.

In what’s become a bit of my own tradition, on the first night our backyard rink is solid, typically under the moon light, I skate by myself. I dump a bucket of pucks, and poorly stickhandle and shoot, and my brain goes blank. I lose track of time, get lost in the sounds, and occasionally take a break to drink a beer I’ve squirreled away in the snowbank nearby.

Written words don’t really do it justice, but it’s one of my happy places in life. Frozen water, a frigid evening, and all the time in the world to think about everything and nothing at all.