Hockey

The Ritual of Ice-Making Means Guessing When It’s Finally Winter

By Gina Knudson, 11-16-10

	Ray Muscarella sprays water at the Salmon Hockey Rink to form another layer of ice. Photo by Jeff Knudson.

Come November, diehard hockey fans celebrate cold, especially when their ice rinks are uncovered and exposed to the elements. Unseasonably warm, sunny days are as unwelcome as a surprise appearance by your future mother-in-law at your bachelorette party.

Once the weeklong ritual of making ice at the Salmon hockey rink begins, sunshine makes the all-volunteer ice making team sweat. Sure, that’s partly because the team’s uniform— insulated Carhartt coveralls—is not well-suited to neotropical temperatures. Also, the go or no-go decision of when to start making ice is much debated within the local hockey community. Start too early and get struck by mild temperatures and that godforsaken sun and the refrigeration unit works nonstop, which drives power costs through the roof. Start too late and the youth hockey teams can’t practice. That means the David-versus-Goliath matchups between our teams and those from bigger towns become even more lopsided.

Members of Salmon’s volunteer ice-making team celebrate the rink’s completion at the freshly painted center ice. Photo by Jeff Knudson.

The ice-making team, mostly hockey dads, considers the question of when to flood the rink with a combination of Farmer’s Almanac readings, old-timer storytelling from veterans of pre-refrigeration, economic forecasts and arm-wrestling. This year, the Council of Cold picked Monday, Nov. 8, as the anointed start date.

This decision then leads to a series of night-shift work, where the team fire-hoses layer after layer of water over the rink’s sandy base. While watching a glacier melt is touted as the benchmark of boring, the annual ritual of watching ice form is something of a social affair, at least if you are wearing Carhartt coveralls.

The debut of the frozen slab marks the beginning of a four-month period when the hockey rink and the small complex of buildings around it will function on a daily basis as community recreation center, social club and local visitors’ bureau.

Now, the word is out in Salmon—the rink is ready for skating. The painted lines are perfect, the white ice brilliant under the clear, black sky. For the rest of the season, we open-air hockey fans will cheer each cold day and wish for the clouds to cover the sun.

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