I love skating on our pond. It’s one of the many things that make living here awesome. We’ve been corresponding with a lot of readers lately who say “Oh, I just dream of living like you do.” Many seem to work at jobs they’re not overly enamored with. So let me state, just to make you feel better, that I have no plan on how I’m ever going to retire. I’m going to have to keep working until I drop dead in the potato patch. And really, not a bad way to go I think. Better than wasting away in some institution.
That being said, since we moved here 15 years ago, when I was 40, I’ve had a pond to skate on, and I love skating on my pond. I am overjoyed when I skate on my pond. Just going round and round and round and zoning out and smiling like a mad man. It helps that the pond is right under the wind turbine. “I” put that up! I did that! And it powers my home, especially at this time of year when the solar panels do much less of the “heavy lifting.” I can see both of my solar arrays from the pond too. “I put them up! I did that! OK, I did all that with the help of my neighbor Ken. He’s awesome too!
I’m not sure where this love of skating came from but ‘the force is strong in this one.” I spent part of my childhood in a house along the St. Lawrence River, which drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic Ocean. So I grew up skating on outside ice. There were the rare times when the ice would freeze thick enough to skate on without any snow on top. You could cross country skate. If you wound up and slapped a puck as hard as you could it would take you 10 minutes to catch up to it.
After we moved away from that house we spent many Christmases at my parents’ cottage on a lake and I always shoveled a rink. So when we moved here having my own rink really was a dream come true. When I skate on my rink I do not think about my lack of retirement funds, or just how long it will be before we’re burning the furniture to stay warm. I just think how lucky I am to have this little bit of frozen water beside my cozy little house off the grid that I can skate on … whenever I want … for as long as I want … in whatever direction I want.
I do think about the monetary value of this rink. What do you figure it costs to build a hockey arena today? Half a million dollars? A million? So the way I figure it, as I skate around, I’m worth a million bucks! Take that evil mutual fund companies that run ads trying to scare me about the terror of retiring without sufficient funds … in the stock market … which always goes up in value … forever … right?
I particularly like skating at dusk. There is nothing like the feeling of zipping around on a pond where I can see our cozy little house all toasty warm-looking, lit by the batteries charged by the sun and the wind, heated with wood that absorbed carbon dioxide as it was growing. It’s simply magical.
Pond skating is a very Canadian (and northern American) thing to do. There is a great song by Tom Cochrane called ‘Big League’ with the line “Sometimes at night I can hear the ice crack, it sounds like thunder and rips through my back…” Our pond cracks and makes horrific sounds when we skate on it. Joyful fright.
In our book, Little House Off The Grid, I talk about our neighbor Ken who has been so instrumental in the evolution of our home to one that runs so smoothly. One night before we had completely moved here I came up during an ice storm to test a generator. It was winter and I was dressed in arctic survival gear, constantly in fear of running the truck off the road and freezing within minutes. Ken stopped in on his way home from work. Despite the freezing ice pellets that were being blown around, Ken was dressed in leather shoes with a leather jacket that was undone showing a cotton shirt and tie underneath. He skated across the frozen lawn and said, “Well at least there’s no black flies!” BEST… LINE… EVER!
When we moved here I had a backhoe come in and dig out the spot where water had sat the previous spring. It was a natural indentation so I thought if I scooped out some soil/sand, we might have a shot at a pond, and therefore a rink.
Then a few years later Ken was over one day with his ATV and offered to clear the rink after a big snow. He couldn’t get much traction so his brother-in-law Cyril stood on the back of the ATV. Still not go. So I got on. There we were, 3 people on a one-person ATV, 27,000 lbs on newly formed ice with a great weight of snow on it as well. I was lucky that I was perched precariously on the very back of the machine so I could jump off the moment it all went crashing through the ice. I was wishing I’d put a rope near the pond so I could pull Ken and Cyril out. And how were we going to fish the ATV out once it plunged to the bottom? Ken, as always, is never fazed by any of this. He gets a kick out of my constant state of panic.
As we were plowing the rink Ken turned to Cyril and said, “Cam made this!” referring to the pond. I would never take credit for the work of nature or some Supreme Being or life force, but I have to say it was the SECOND BEST LINE EVER. “Cam made this!” And that’s why I love Ken like a brother. And why skating on my rink is a joyful, joyful, joyful thing to do.
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