The Home-ice Advantage: Few Things Are Nicer Than A Rink Of One's Own

I stuck my rink on a warm morning in the false spring of this past February. After the children left for school, I took a 16-inch knife sharpening steel, walked to the southeast corner of the 54-by-32-foot skating rink in the backyard of my home in Natick, Mass. and thrust the steel into a gap in the plywood boards, through a piece of canvas that had served to seal the seam, and into the plastic liner. A stream of cold water, the lifeblood of the rink, poured through the hole and ran into the garden.

By midafternoon the pool of water that had once been the rink had drained enough so that my 12-year-old son, Brian, and I could step on islands of exposed plastic out to where we could pick up the regulation-size (6' x 4') hockey goal. Then we carried it to its off-season location in front of the garage door, where it will be the focus of street hockey games as well as the target of tennis balls until December brings the ice again.

I might have drained the rink completely by piercing it in the southwest corner—the deepest part—except that putting a hole there would have defied what I long ago learned is, for rink builders, an immutable law of hydrodynamics. Namely, water seeking its own level will find it in your neighbor's yard.

I discovered this 25 years ago when, in my first effort to build a rink, I let the garden hose run all night on my parents' lawn. The next morning I found not a frozen pool but a river running through our lilacs and under our neighbors' grape arbor. My engineering failure was nothing compared to the diplomatic problem facing my parents, relationships with those particular neighbors being such that Wiffle Balls hit into their yard were declared automatic double plays. The summer after I'd flooded their yard we changed that rule to automatic side retired. My yard produced a generation of straightaway hitters but no skaters.

I didn't try to build a rink again until last year.

When, as a boy, I had tried to do so, no one asked me why. It surprised me that, on seeing an adult building a rink, most of my friends assumed they knew why. Obviously, I was trying to make my children better hockey players or figure skaters. I knew that wasn't true, but why was I building it? I decided it had to do with the reason why I walked off a golf course last June when the starter insisted that my friend and I join a twosome we didn't know, and why I won't sign up for tennis-court time or stand in ski lift lines, although, if I had a mountain in my yard, I would ski. In the matter of personal recreation and casual sport, I prefer to descend the evolutionary ladder, moving away from organization and mass participation toward individuality and spontaneity. Or, as my daughter, Tracey, then eight, said two years ago when asked if she wanted to sign up for skating classes: "No. I want to have my own fun, not somebody else's fun."

I was building a rink for the fun of it. On my first try, in late November of 1982, I packed the snow of a recent storm into walls two to three feet high. These were to be the boundaries of a small rink. At sundown, I turned on the hose and let the water run over the now cleared and frozen ground, filling the rink.

"Will that kill the grass?" asked my wife, Barbara.

"I hope so," I said.

At 2 a.m., just as the rink was almost full, the southwest wall gave way and water flooded a corner of my neighbor's yard.