Before splitting up for the holidays, I wanted to meet up with my Bay Area transplant cousins Maddy and Adam. Maddy suggested that we might go ice skating, and since Julie had coincidentally mentioned skating as well, I knew we had quorum.
Wanting to avoid downtown Oakland, we drove out to Walnut Creek on Ice, which was the next closest rink to Berkeley. It was small and crowded. There were a lot of flailing skaters to avoid. It wasn’t safe to go very quickly. All of that was very similar to my past 2 experiences skating at the Winter Lodge.
What was new, however, were the “walkers”. Instead of carefully skating with their children and occasionally getting pulled down, parents could rent big, plastic, sliding podiums (see an example here) for their children to hang onto and scoot along. I can appreciate the concept: they work like training wheels, and they provide a physical barrier around the child. However, I found them somewhat scary because they can move so much faster and unpredictably than a child sitting on their butt because they had fallen down.
Having to deal with inexperienced skaters is fairly unusual amongst leisure activities. Most activities are structured and separated: 10 people play a game of pickup basketball, and 2 play a game of chess. Some players are good and some are bad, but you generally don’t have to worry about someone else knocking over your pieces. Even in other forms of exercise, there’s enough structure to avoid chaos. Swimming pools for doing laps get divided into lanes, and when it’s just open hours at a pool, there isn’t much of a shared goal. Ski slopes are rated for difficulty, and bicyclers pass on the left.
The skating rink, however, can have an arbitrary number of people sharing the same space, and successfully skating requires a lot of awareness to avoid others interfering with you. I have heard that some rinks have inner and outer loops for different experience levels, but that isn’t a lot of granularity for the chaos that can still ensue when one person can’t stop in time.
The fact that we haven’t imposed more structure, however, is maybe a testament to its effectiveness. When people fall in a skating rink, they usually laugh despite landing on ice. I can’t remember witnessing any serious injuries while skating. Generally, the crowd successfully skates around at the same rate. Despite complaining about how choppy the ice gets and how I almost got decked trying to avoid some hapless child, I have a good time skating, and since the rinks haven’t put in rules, I guess other people do, too.
After skating, we went to Smoke’s Poutinerie for dinner to incidentally complete a very Canadian experience here in California. Despite having skated frequently as a child in Canada, I can’t remember eating poutine while there. My best hypothesis for why is similar to why I missed other food in my childhood: my mom didn’t like it. But she probably knows best. Despite how wild the skating rink looks, a pile of fries drenched in gravy and covered with bacon is probably more dangerous anyways.