Climate change imperils a ritual: Canada’s backyard rinks are melting
WATERLOO, Ontario — Jack Williams and his sister, Cara, sat in their kitchen watching their backyard rink melt.
“Dad calls it a big birdbath,” said Jack, who is 12.
Their father, Ian, lovingly rebuilds the rink every year. He shovels it clear after each snowfall, and occasionally finishes the 24-foot-by-48-foot surface with hot water. He frets over every leaf that lands on the ice: they warm with the sunlight and create mini-craters.
A rink like the Williamses’ used to offer good skating in this part of Canada from early December into March. But on this late February afternoon, the temperature outside was 55 degrees and rain had fallen steadily all day. The week before, two feet of snow — mostly gone now, with leftover mounds seeping foggy wisps into the saturated air — blanketed the ground.
Williams makes a rink every year because he had one across the street when he was a child. Long seasons on the ice helped him get good enough to play college hockey.
“You want your kids to experience a little of the goodness you had when you were growing up,” he said. He has seen Jack’s and Cara’s skills improve, and he enjoys when their friends come over to skate and play hockey or just goof around on the ice.
But Williams is finding it hard to maintain the ice in a warming world. “There’s a huge difference between when I grew up and was skating outside, and the last five years of skating out here,” he said. “Will my kids, my grandkids, be able to play in an outdoor rink? Probably not. It might be a dying tradition.”
That day last month happened to be the warmest Feb. 20 in recorded history for Waterloo. The previous record was set in 2016, noted Robert Mcleman, an environmental scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University here. “You’re here on a landmark day,” he told me. “And if you come back in a couple of years, you’ll probably have another one.”
An hour away in Brantford — hometown of Wayne Gretzky, who learned to skate on a backyard rink made by his father — a huge flood forced me to cancel a tour of local rinks and required thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.
Climate change is warming the Northern Hemisphere rapidly, largely because of the greenhouse gases that humans have put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age.
Mcleman, with Colin Robertson, both associate professors of geography at Wilfrid Laurier, created Rink Watch, a citizen science project that has enlisted more than 1,500 backyard rink owners like Williams — about 80 percent of them in Canada — to report skating conditions on a daily basis.
Climate change does not mean the immediate end of cold weather, as recent nor’easters have shown, but it is putting a squeeze on outdoor skating, a deep part of this country’s cultural identity. Irregular freezing weather is not enough for a good outdoor rink; consistency is key.
At least five days of hard freezing, 14 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, is essential to start a rink, Mcleman said. And 23 degrees or lower is required from then on to maintain a good surface.
“Any warmer than that and the rink is no longer skateable,” he said. “And that’s sort of on the horizon for us in the second half of the 21st century,” with warmer temperatures and more frequent thaws shrinking the season for outdoor skating. “Is anyone going to put in the effort for just a few, or just a couple, of weeks?”
Combining projections of climate change with their current data, the Rink Watch researchers have projected the number of skating days to decline by 34 percent in Toronto and 19 percent in Calgary by 2090.
“As average inter-month temperature regimes across large parts of northern North America and Eurasia warm into this window over the course of the coming century, growing numbers of people will experience winters that are cold and icy, but not cold or icy enough to skate,” they wrote in a report published in The Canadian Geographer.
Mcleman said that life without natural outdoor rinks was not unthinkable. But, he said, it would be sad. “If you take that away from us, life will go on. We’ll do the things we’ve always done,” he said. “But we’ll lose a little bit of that cultural heritage.”
The National Hockey League expressed concern about the warming trend as part of its first sustainability report, issued in 2014. The league commissioner, Gary Bettman, wrote, “Our sport can trace its roots to frozen freshwater ponds, to cold climates.”
Many immigrants to Canada and their families, Mcleman said, find hockey as “an entry point to access mainstream Canadian culture.” He pointed to NHL defenseman P.K. Subban, whose parents came to Toronto from Jamaica and Montserrat. “It’s our version of the melting pot,” he said. “Anybody who shows up with skates and a stick can join in.”
Rink Watch has helped Canadians understand the real-life consequences of climate change, Robertson said: “The fact that this could be taken away and is tied to climate has been a real eye-opener.”
Mcleman said: “Your average Canadian will never see a polar bear in the wild, will never see a glacier, will never go to the South Pacific. There’s no personal connection. But say your kids or grandkids might not be able to skate on the backyard rink, and they say, ‘Oh, I see the connection!’”
Some parents, too, are anticipating a future without their backyard hobby. Marcin Parobek lives down the street from Williams in Waterloo. As he and his wife, Anna, talked about the joys and frustrations of the rink maintenance they do together, their two boys, Stanley and Lucas, looked out at the watery mess as the afternoon light began to fade.
Parobek knows that the world is warming. The river he skated on as a boy in Poland no longer freezes over in winter. So, too, will Canada’s backyard skating season decline. “At some point, if it’s too short, why do it?” he asked. “It’s not worth the effort.”
Yet other parents say they will hold on to the tradition as long as they can. Michael Berube, a Rink Watch participant in Miramichi, New Brunswick, who has won a Great Canadian Hoser award for his rink, said, “It’s almost like meditation when I get out there at night.”
Will it ever be too much trouble? “Never. I love it.” He will keep building rinks, he said, “As long as I’ve still got some kids that are willing to play on it.”