Fools on ice

Copyright 2006 Lydia Hinshaw

WHITEHORSE, YT -- My triple lutz needs work.
Dick Button would say my style is achingly tentative and my outfit absurdly understated.
Prince Charming and I went ice skating here last weekend. What else are a couple of Floridians supposed to do when they're in Canada, eh?
The Prince grew up in New York State, so he rightfully expected to overwhelm me with his skills. I'm delighted to say I did almost as well as he did, despite a skating career limited to a handful of hilarous sessions in the early 1970s at a rink in Hillsborough, N.C., just up the road from Chapel Hill, where I attended college.
North Carolinians on ice can be divided into two groups. The bowling balls and the pins. I remember playing both roles. We Tar Heels don't have a clue about ice, on skates or in cars.
I was 20 then. I never gave a thought to bumps and bruises. I knew beyond question that they would heal quickly and I would be good as new again. This is no longer the case. At almost 56, I think carefully about any activity that includes a high risk of collision.
So we thought about this for a week, after learning that the rec center's "leisure ice" -- not to be confused with the hockey ice or the figure-skating ice or the speed-skating ice or the curling ice -- was open to the public all day every day.
They even rent skates, which surprised me, in a country where babies seem to be born wearing the things. I figured we had to be the only people hanging around Whitehorse who didn't have our own.
The rec center provides "helper" devices, the equivalent of training wheels for skates, in adult sizes. You push the thing in front of you, grocery-cart style and it prevents those sprawling crashes I remember from my former life.
The clincher was the presence of an honest-to-goodness emergency room just a couple of miles away. We've been living in hospital-free Skagway, AK, all summer. This has made us even more careful than usual.
A nice young lady rented us skates and turned us loose on a small rink, apparently intended for toddlers. But a Zamboni driver soon smoothed out the adjacent hockey rink and invited us to skate there.
As he was opening the gate for us, he told us, with a faint German accent, that he'd been on skates once in his life, just long enough to fall and break his shoulder.
Always nice to get some encouragement.
For the next 45 minutes, we provided entertainment for a dozen Canadians on treadmills, stairmasters and exercycles in the second-floor cardio workout room that overlooks the ice. As far as I could tell, none of them were laughing, at least not very hard.
The Prince didn't fall at all and I had only one minor knee-banger. We decided to quit while we were intact and adjourned to the pool, where we ceased to be such obvious foreigners.
Sadly, there are no photographs of our adventure. We were willing to risk our bodies, but not our cameras.