Winter Wonderland

Every year, around the first snowfall, I promise to dig out my skates and make some use of the Rideau Canal. For the better part of the last twenty years I have lived within walking distance of the world's longest outdoor skating rink but despite this I can count, on one hand, the number of times I've been on it. I don't handle the cold weather very well and it has been suggested to me, on more than one occasion, that if I had something to do during the long months of winter, I wouldn't be such a miserable lout.

I have compared living in Ottawa, during the winter months, to the necessity of hibernation in the animal world. The long nights and short days, huddled around whatever source of heat you can find, poking the mountains of snow with a stick to locate the car, adding twenty pounds of clothing, preferably fur, every time you need to step outside and resigning yourself to being perpetually damp, despite the dry air, gives me, in my mind, the right to complain, often and loudly, that winter sucks. The remedy for this, according to my sadistic friends, is to find some form of entertainment that will take my mind off of it. And skating, according to the millions of people who descend on Ottawa every winter, to glide up and down the canal, sipping hot chocolate and munching on Beavertails, is a sure way to beat the season.

In the early nineteenth century, the British government, worried about our land hungry neighbours to the south, decided to construct a secure waterway, linking the port of Montreal to the mills in Kingston. It was thought that a canal system, running right through the dense and difficult terrain, would provide an easily defended supply line and construction began, after years of surveying, in 1827.

Of course, by the time it was done we didn't need it anymore.

So, with nothing better to do while they waited for warmer weather, a few adventurous sorts strapped a couple of blades to their feet and, in true Canadian fashion, built an industry out of their misfortune.

Ottawa is a town that loves its festivals and even I have to admit that the sight of the ice sculptures, the miles of twinkling lights, the smell of wood fires and the faces of so many awe-struck tourists can inspire a bit of nationalistic pride in my frozen heart.

So, here we go again.

I promise that this year I will suffer the pain of balancing on two impossible narrow steel blades, suck up the cold-induced aching of my joints and fingers, hide my embarrassment at being circled by roving bands of teenagers, deriding my inferior skating abilities and enjoy the canal, not as it was originally intended, perhaps, but as it is currently acclaimed, in an effort to appease all those people who would normally have to put up with me being crabby and miserable for the next four months.

You never know. If I can rediscover my childlike enthusiasm for the season, I might be able to emerge from my self-imposed solitude, next spring, with a smile and a new found delight in what otherwise might be a hopelessly long sojourn through that dark suffering of the soul we call winter.