The Gwinnett Gladiators announced that their March 17th game will be played on green ice in commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day. While I think it’s a novel concept, depending on the shade of green they use, it could be a real challenge for the players to follow the puck. I think it will be even harder to follow for the untrained hockey fan’s eye.
Thinking of the color of the ice got me to thinking about my skating days when I was growing up in Detroit. We lived on the canals which were right off where Lake St. Clair funneled into the Detroit River. The whiter the ice was, the safer it was to walk on. Dark grey generally meant it wasn’t thick enough. Usually if it was around 4 inches it would be safe to support an adult without many worries. The absolute best ice was when the canals would not be frozen solid and then we’d get a few days of windy, subzero temperatures. When those conditions swooped down on Detroit, it created clear ice that was over a foot thick and was the absolute best to skate on. You could look right through it which was always kind of neat to see how thick it was.
When you grow up on the canals or a lake, you know very quickly what kind of ice is safe and what’s not. I saw several kids fall into the ice in areas they never should have been. Thankfully none of them drowned. The only time I fell through the ice was actually in our boatwell, which was outdoors and not covered. I was crossing over to the other side on a wooden plank we had and either I had a sugar rush from too much candy that morning or I simply wasn’t paying attention, I lost my balance and fell through the ice which was about an inch thick at the time. Thankfully the water level in most boatwells was never more than a few feet deep so I was able to break the ice, walk to the side and pull myself up. Obviously I was fucking freezing by the time I got into the house to dry up.
There were times when the ice would crack right underneath us and that always got the heart pumping a little bit. Keep in mind that while the ice surface in a canal stays the same level, the water below, depending on the tides, can be way below the bottom of the ice surface or can push up on it. There were times when the water was a full foot below the bottom of the ice surface and many times the entire ice surface dropped to that level. Usually you could hear the cracking sounds and head for the ground when that happened. One time there was no audio warning and I was actually sitting on a seawall resting from skating and the ice dropped a few inches suddenly. When that happens, water seeps up from the sides and through all the cracks so I was fortunate not to be on the ice when that happened.
As a kid who was obsessed with skating in the winter time (hey, there weren’t many outdoor activities for white kids in Detroit in the winter!), I would always get really pissed off at certain boaters and fisherman. When the first freeze of the season happened, one or two boats, without fail every year, would crash through the ice to get their boats back to their boatwell. This would always mess up the surface of the ice, rendering it impossible to skate, so I would have to wait until it thawed and froze again to be able to begin skating on the canals for that season.
Most boatwells were covered, much like a garage. There would be ice inside these boatwells but since it’s warmer inside, it was never safe to walk on. Usually they all would have a rim of water lining the inner seawalls, so if a puck went inside a boatwell, it was lost. I daresay that if they dredged up the area where I lived, based on the amount of pucks my friends and neighbors any myself lost, it would number into the hundreds. In addition, playing hockey on the canals presented an entirely new twist when shooting a puck off a seawall. Seawalls are generally corrugated, bent to resemble an accordion, so you never knew which way the puck was going to bounce off of them. It’s like guessing which way a football will bounce once it touches the ground.
To give an idea of how our neighborhood canal system looked like, see the first photo below (taken from Google Maps). I've outlined a box where our house used to be and you can see the outdoor boatwell. The second photo below is a map which shows how close we were to Canada. Our street was Scripps and we were right behind Harbor Island, a man-made island. As you can see, the park that I played at faced Canada. To us, Canada was like another state, not a country. This explains somewhat why I developed a deep love for hockey.
