Skaters warm up to Ottawa's 5-mile-long rink

02-22-2004

OTTAWA, Ontario -- YOW! That three-letter designation is how the world's aviation industry refers to Ottawa's Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. It was also my first reaction as the lobby doors slid open and I stepped though into the early evening chill on the way to the rental car station.

The temperatures had been in the low teens when we'd flown out of Pittsburgh an hour earlier. But at a degree or two below zero and with a stiff, polar wind that was several days fresher than anything we were used to, this was cold of a different order. It was like walking into a deep freeze.

Were we out of our minds? With all the frigid ice-sliding at home, why would anyone fly north to a place where the ice was the main attraction?

Ottawa is a great place to visit, with plenty of culture, history and great cuisine. There's even a casino across the river. But that mostly happens in the year's warmer seasons.

Judging from the absence of ski racks at airport auto rental stations, I suspected that winter tourism must be fairly infrequent in Ottawa, especially for outdoor sports. After all, this is the time of year when even Canadian tourists flock south.

In late January, at the suggestion of Roye Werner and Reid Andrews, a Point Breeze couple and longtime friends of ours who accompanied us, my wife and I made the journey to experience ice skating in a whole new way, on a slick, groomed surface just under 5 miles long (7.8 kilometers), which is billed as the World's Longest Skating Rink.

Understand that I believe in making the most of winter and generally enjoy cold weather activities, especially cross-country skiing, but I've never been an avid skater. There were no Penguins in Pittsburgh when I was growing up, and, apart from a few opportunities to skim across a frozen lake, skating was always something that was done circling a rink with dozens of other people. Fun perhaps, but a fairly confined, crowded experience.

But when our friends kept extolling the bliss of skating on Ottawa's Rideau Canal, my wife and I were both intrigued.

Perhaps a bit of historical background is called for.

Although the city of Ottawa has been Canada's capital for nearly 150 years, its identity was first defined by the Rideau Canal, a 125-mile-long waterway built by a By between 1827 and 1832, Col. John By, to be exact.

An engineer in the British Army, By was charged with creating a navigable waterway 5 feet deep from the eastern end of Lake Ontario up marshy rivers, over hard rock hills and back down again to a point on the Ottawa River opposite the Quebec village of Hull. Of course, the actual work was done by more than 2,000 Irish and French-Canadian laborers, under the direction of a bevy of subcontractors, all overseen by two companies of British Royal Sappers and Miners.

The resulting canal remains a marvel of early 18th-century engineering, but it never lived up to its supporters' intentions. Conceived in the aftermath of the War of 1812, the canal was meant to provide the British with a more defensible and reliably navigable water route from Montreal into the Great Lakes.

Although 90 percent of the route followed natural water courses, the 12 miles that did not required a colossal colonial construction project, with 49 massive, cut stone locks that could accommodate vessels up to 33 feet wide and 135 feet long and still be operated by hand. The northern eight of these massive stone locks lower boats more than 100 feet down a steep bluff into the Ottawa River. The project was designed as a "slack-water" canal, without strong currents. (That fact will become important later on.)

The canal was never needed for its original military purposes, but the village that took root around its northern terminus (originally known as By-town, after the good colonel) grew in commercial importance with the trade that flowed along the canal. In the mid-1850s, when Queen Victoria was looking to create a capital city for her Canadian colonies, it was decided that the bluff above By-town, symbolically situated on the border between Ontario and Quebec, would make a magnificent site to build a Parliament complex. Ottawa was really on the map.

The Rideau Canal itself, however, was rendered commercially obsolete by that time, superseded by railroads and ships that could ply the St. Lawrence. But rather than sinking into obscurity, the entire canal has been maintained in operating condition, and its many miles of wilderness waterways are still frequented, primarily by pleasure craft throughout the months when it is not iced over. In fact, it is the oldest continuously operated canal in North America.

Main Street, Chillville

For the past 30 winters, however, Canada's capital has been transformed into the world capital of long ice. The frozen surface of the Rideau Canal's five northernmost miles is made blade-ready, from the locks at Hartwells to the eight locks at Rideau Street in what is now downtown Ottawa, where vessels are still lowered into the river far below.

As soon as the ice is thick enough, usually around Christmas, a highway-wide band of snow is plowed and brushed away, exposing the icy surface. Each night strategic holes are augered through the ice and canal water is pumped on to its surface. Because it's a canal with manageable water levels and no current, the new layer of ice freezes hard and nearly Zamboni-smooth, with relatively few surface irregularities or hairline cracks.

By morning, a fresh, glassy promenade 50 yards wide and nearly 5 miles long awaits early risers. Open all day and free (a $2 contribution is suggested), as the hours go by, the canal becomes a steady procession of skaters of all ages and abilities, from zippy little kids darting around, to placid octogenarians, to sleek-skinned, smooth-striding speed skaters moving in rhythmic tandem. Students skate to and from school. Commuters blade to work. Bands of joggers shuffle along the canal's snowy fringe.

All through the day and well after dark, they glide up and down the canal at their own pace. They're wearing figure skates, hockey skates and long blades. Many skate with their street shoes laced together and hanging from their necks. Parents tow infants on plastic sleds and push them on rubber-wheeled strollers.

As the canal winds through Ottawa, it is lined on each side by parkland. It sweeps past stately institutional edifices and neat houses, past an outdoor stadium and under half a dozen bridges.

At each end and at several points along the way, heated changing booths are dragged onto the ice, along with wooden kiosks where coffee and hot chocolate are sold, along with local delicacies such as beaver tails. These are not the caudal appendages of semi-aquatic, herbivorous rodents, but flat, fried, whole-wheat pastries topped with sugar and cinnamon, maple syrup and other sweet toppings. There's maple taffy, which is poured from a crock and cooled by dripping on troughs of fresh snow. For skaters who prefer more substantive fare, a canal-side restaurant and ice cafe are inviting.

I am not aware of anything like it anywhere else. There are places to skate on frozen ponds, lakes and rivers, but they are a rarity these days, unless one is fortunate enough to be present when the conditions are just right. And skating on open bodies of water always presents other risks, as known by anyone who has ever been in the middle of a deep, frozen lake and heard the great groan of thick ice settling and cracking. Large outdoor skating ovals have been built in various locations, where speed skaters can go and practice -- Lake Placid, N.Y., for example -- but though wonderful facilities, they are still basically a track. The canals of Holland are occasionally skated, but there, the cold is more problematic and the ice surfaces seldom tended.

But Hans Brinker would love Ottawa's canal, where the ice is carefully maintained, monitored and patrolled by people who appreciate the gem they have. Since it is a canal, the water level under the ice stays constant, so there's little surface shifting. About the only obstacles skaters have to watch out for are each other and the occasional, well-marked plug holes where water to flood the surface was pumped.

Other than that, skating on the canal is pure, unfettered freedom.

The civic commitment to the Skateway is both unique and commendable. The benefits are obvious. Skating is a popular pastime here, but the canal encourages large numbers of people to go out to enjoy the winter, instead of hunkering down at home. The canal becomes a lively boulevard, a promenade of good-natured, wintry enthusiasm, with everyone seeming to wear a smile.

As I quickly learned when I took to the ice that first morning, long-distance skating is dramatically different from circling a rink.

Although we had bundled up against the cold, we quickly warmed with the exercise. However, when you're skating a long way outside, wind becomes a real factor. When it blows in your face, the sport is like skating uphill. When the wind is at your back, skating becomes more like flying. No one would mistake me for a graceful skater, but aided by the wind, I was able to get a real rhythm going that allowed me a sense of what it must be to glide along in those long, sweeping strides of speed skaters.

I also discovered another painful lesson on my first run up the canal. I'd worn my skates on rinks for years with no problem, but long-distance skating is quite different. When a blister started forming halfway through the 10-mile jaunt, I couldn't just stop, take off my skates and walk away. I did everything I could to ease the rubbing, but by the time I got back to the start, I had worn a deep quarter-sized hole on the inside of my left heel. That wound slowed me down somewhat on subsequent skates, but it didn't stop me from trying. The pleasure definitely offset the pain.

The temperature was still frigid when we took our last skate up the canal on a Sunday morning, but now we were rooting for the cold.

And my Yow! had turned into a Wow!

 

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