Winter in Chicago is always unpredictable. Sure, it gets
cold and an occasional snowstorm disrupts routines and even shuts down schools
every few years. But ice worthy of skating when I was a child existed for a relatively
brief time between mid-December and early March in the best of years.
There were no ice rinks where I grew up until much later. In
those days, community groups cooperated with the fire department to flood a
couple of smooth local fields when the weather forecast was favorable. And
tucked away between my grammar school and a handful of sequestered homes was a
small circular pond with a central tree-filled island. Skating there was
preferable to the flooded fields. It was liberating to carve up the ice in any
direction, not simply traveling around in monitored circles as you would in a
roller rink.
Our pond was called Maine Park. When we were small it seemed
enormous. Much later visits with my own children proved it to be not much more
than a retention pond. But it was in a pretty, although by current standards
isolated and creepy, setting.
Nestled in a suburban neighborhood, and being in such close
proximity to our school, the crowd that gathered at the park for skating
closely resembled the K-6 population. But young adults and parents with small
children mixed in, serving as a buffer that prevented much of the clique
formation and social structure inherent in gym class or recess. It felt safer.
The Park District constructed a temporary warming house each
winter. A small wooden structure with benches along the walls, it provided a
sheltered place to rest when tingling fingers began to hurt and toes became
completely numb. I recall hot chocolate being available, but that may be a
product of revisionist historical embellishment. Nobody really liked being in
the warming house. It cut into our skating time.
On January 24th of 1965, Chicago was hit with a
crippling ice storm that caused extensive damage, power outages, and generally brought
things to a halt for a couple of days. The autumn just prior to this, Oakton
Street, a thoroughfare through the north side of town, began undergoing
widening from two lanes to four. The project was worked on as weather
permitted, redirecting traffic to two lanes as the others were paved and sealed
with asphalt.
Sometime during the height of the ice storm, those of us at
home due to school closure discovered that the cordoned-off segment of the
street, straight and smooth and flat, was thick with ice as smooth and hard as
if it had been carefully conditioned for skating. And skate we did, at first tentatively
while we tested the integrity and consistency of the frozen surface, and then
with wild abandon, like birds launching into uplifting thermals over a canyon.
😎
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