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Love at First Ice
Freezing Winter Temperatures
Turn the Rideau Canal into a Skater’s Paradise
By Patricia Kutza
Fleming on ice….Peggy
says it can be cold and unforgiving. I can vouch for both. Yet the hot
spikes of laughter grazing my neck as trios of skaters glided by, made me
feel that in this place ice can both embrace and constrict the veins.
 Don't get me wrong
here. The Rideau Canal in early February does not suffer fools. Hot pink
spandex will do in an indoor ice arena. In the bitter Ottawa cold, only
those swathed in the warmest outerwear survive.
I wasn't wearing hot
pink spandex when I broached the Rideau adventure to a fellow skater at my
Berkeley, California-based home rink. She looked suspiciously at me as if I
was testing her global knowledge of rinks. It's located in Ottawa, …Canada,
that is.
You see, if you are an
earnest skater (who signs her autosignature in freestyle), discovering new
rinks is a sort-of-one-upmanship affair: you get kudos for the discovery but
also a side-wised glance not unlike the glance I once got from my Scrabble
partner after my winning word ‘oleander.’ clinched the game.
So I was more than a
bit crestfallen when my vacation pictures came back from the photo
developer. I had documented the hordes of skaters enjoying Rideau's curves,
the sled-pulled bundled-up babies, the long queues at the Beaver Tail huts
(like Churros but flatter and longer), the incredible mosaic of colorful
blankets, snowsuits and leggings: every sign proving that the Rideau Canal
is indeed, at 7.8 kilometers, the longest ice rink in the world and from as
far as my eye could see, frequented by some of the happiest people on earth.
 Yet I had forgotten to
show that you can actually stay so close to the Canal that walking over in
your skates (guards on, of course) is common. For my fellow California
skaters who don't think twice of driving 75 minutes one way to the rink of
their choice…this fact alone IS the 8th Wonder of the World.
Max, of course, doesn’t
need those pictures. This By-the-Pond resident gets his daily dose of the
Canal when his master, bed and breakfast owner, Ruth Majoli, takes him for a
daily stroll paralleling the Canal. Ruth tells me dogs aren't allowed on the
Canal. I, in turn like any good skater who looks for impediments on the ice,
prissily informed this press release-type fact to the jogging partner of a
dalmation that I had just narrowly avoided. His eyes informed me..'neither
are meddling Californians'.
 Plenty of those same
Canadians who now skate the Canal approximately 52 days each year once
prissily informed Douglas Fullerton back in 1969 that transforming the
Canal from its marine transport function to an ice play land was a pretty
silly idea. Fortunately Douglas’ will prevailed and once again in 2002, 33
seasons later, the Rideau Canal is the centerpiece of Ottawa’s yearly
Winterlude Festival.
Winterlude has an
unabashed love affair with water, specifically ice and snow. Dow Lake, at
one end of the Canal, hosts the City of Ottawa Snow Sculpture Challenge.
Most years at least sixty snow sculptures stand where just 2 seasons later
picnic baskets will sit. Near Parliament, Confederation Park becomes the
Casino de Hull Crystal Garden, attracting world-class ice carvers bent on
creating some of the best temporal art on the planet.
At least a hundred
like-minded folk like myself stood in a very serious snowstorm to watch
artists like Japan's Hideo Fujiyama have their way with huge blocks of ice.
Celebrating its fifteenth year, the Crystal Garden challenge has drawn such
international talent as British Canadian Hiroshi Takahashi, France-based
Steve Armance and Samuel Girault as well as the hometown favorites Armando
and Antonio Baisas from Hull, Quebec.
 Ice is a siren needing
noise as well as silence. As Fujiyama's screeching chainsaw sliced deep into
a crystalline shape my thoughts wandered again to my home rink where skaters
do 'patch' in the wee hours of the morning. Each skater's patch is a piece
of perfect ice to be etched into the art of figures, etched carefully,
etched silently.
I've seen these skaters
flinch when the Zamboni machine eventually flattens their inscriptions. On
my final swing through the Crystal Garden one unseasonably warm morning, I
noticed that Fujiyama’s panther, so fierce the night before, was tamed by
another type of bulldozer. Ice may be cold and unforgiving. But on this
morning, it was the sun who had the final say.
Contact Information:
Ottawa's Winterlude
Festival is held yearly during the first three weeks of February.
For more information
consult the Winterlude 2003 Website at
http://www.capcan.ca/winterlude
or call 1 800 465-1867.
Ice carving was an
Olympic event at the Provo, Utah-based 2002 Winter Olympics. Thirty
two-person teams were given ten blocks of ice and seventeen hours to
complete their submissions. For more information consult: http://www.nica.org/olympics.html.
By-the-Pond Bed and
Breakfast
18 Wilton Crescent, Ottawa, ON
(613) 236-5693
http://www.ottawaplus.ca/roundup/7865
Images by Patricia
Kutza
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