Zamboni Thoughts #2
An installment series about driving an impossible vehicle
OK. I was wearing a thigh-length, sort-of-ratty sweatshirt dress. Thick black leggings. Hat: check. And after some discussion with Davin about correct ice arena footwear, I had sturdy black rubber-soled leather ankle boots on.
It was time to go learn to drive the Zamboni.
Davin eyed me. “You look… kind of fancy.”
“This is what I have,” I said.
“What about your real winter coat?”
“It’s way too hot. And puffy.”
“But this is like a fashion jacket.”
I had topped the sweatshirt dress with my current favorite coat, a profoundly fuzzy, satin-lined, black angora jacket. It didn’t button, but it was warm, and also I thought of it as causal.
“It’s fine,” I said, annoyed. “This is a normal jacket.”
“Aren’t those your nice gloves?”
“I can’t find my garden gloves,” I said, waving the pair of skintight black leather gloves I was clutching so they flopped in Davin’s face. “So this is my worst pair of good gloves.”
They were elbow-length gloves, but they were gloves. It’d be fine.
I was supposed to be there in five minutes. Running late, on my first day! This was gonna look bad. I jingled my keys. “I’m heading out. See you in a bit.”
“Have fun, cutie!”
“I can’t believe I’m finally gonna see what the inside of the marshmallow looks like!” I said, walking outside. So excited.
“Yeah!” Davin said. He was already shutting the door after me. Then – “Wait. What?”
“The building that looks like a marshmallow,” I said. “The ice rink. The inflatable building.”
Davin gazed steadily at me through the half-open door.
“That is a soccer field," he said.
“What?”
“The inflatable building that looks like a marshmallow. The one you’re thinking of. That’s an indoor soccer field.”
“It is?” I had applied for the Zamboni job believing I would be working inside the marshmallow, i.e. the building I had fantasies about popping with a pin whenever I drove by. This was unwelcome news. “But where’s the ice arena, then?” I bleated.
Davin was laughing. “You don’t even know where it is?”
“I AM SO LATE.”
“It’s right by where you turn to go to the vet. Turn left instead of right.” He clocked my glassy-eyed look. “Here, give me your phone, I’ll put it in.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s like a tan, metal building.” He handed my phone back. “You’ll see.”
I got to the Northfield Ice Arena – a battered, corrugated metal structure painted khaki – four minutes late. I had never once seen it before, not in all the time we’d lived in Northfield.
Looking at it from the front, I noticed that the building looked oddly dented. It was if hundreds of people had independently thought, at some point in their lives, i’m going to kick the shit out of this ice rink and then let all their anger at their dad OUT.
The glass front doors slid shakily open.
Tom, the man I’d interviewed with, was there in the front office, waiting.
“Hello there!” he roared. He was hard of hearing; I had forgotten. He looked pleased enough to see me, but it was hard to really tell – his salt-and-pepper mustache and beard covered the lower half of his face. “You ready to go?”
I beamed; I liked Tom. There was someone else with him, too – a tall, young guy.
“This is John*,” Tom bellowed. “He’s going to be training you on the Zamboni.”
“Wow, OK,” I said. “Right now?”
“We’ll do a tour first.”
Tom and John walked me through a second set of glass doors, and… whoa.
It was really cold in there. A whole sheet of ice spread out in front of us. Blue-white, practically glowing, criss-crossed with lines. It was rimmed all around by a wall of thick, scratched glass. Some of the panels of glass had large signs on them that said STAY OFF THE GLASS in all-caps.
I took a deep, chilled breath in. The rink was huge!
I suddenly realized I had not set foot inside an ice arena since the first grade, when I was put into beginner’s figure skating lessons but fell down so much my mom made me wear an old Packers helmet she found at a garage sale. After about five lessons and one trip to the ER, the lessons had mysteriously ended.
Enormous pictures of the Northfield High School varsity hockey players glowered down at us from banners hanging on the walls. Below them, the name of pretty much every business in town ringed the ice, each with its own special, shiny sign. Sponsors, I thought. Who knew the grocery store cared about sports?
We walked all around the arena. Into the offices, up to the wooden bleachers, down the creepy, windowless hallway with its eight small cinderblock locker rooms and flickering fluorescent lights. Up again, this time to the creaking forbidden staircase in the back that led to the scorekeeping overlook.
“Kids are going to ask you for the key to come up here, but do not give it to them,” Tom warned.
“Unless they’re the scorekeepers,” John said.
“How would I know if a kid is a scorekeeper?” I asked.
“You’ll never work by yourself. The other guy you’re working with will know which kid is scorekeeping.”
“How will he know, though?”
John blinked. “He will. We know the kids. Hockey families are… tight.”
Tom chuckled and said nothing.
We went back downstairs.
“This place was built in 1974,” Tom said, thumping the crumpling metal walls outside the locker rooms. “You can tell.”
“Yep,” John agreed, laughing. I liked the way they both talked about the ice arena. They sounded half-proud, half-exasperated. It was kind of a shitbox; the whole thing was obviously falling in on itself.
John had worked there, I found out, for several years. Tom: forever. Together, Tom and John made up the full-time ice arena management team. There were six other people who worked part-time shifts there. Seven now, counting me.
Back in the front office, I squinted at the scribbled schedule for the month on the whiteboard. Every name on it, for every shift, had a man’s name written in.
“Let’s get you on the Zam,” Tom said. “John, go ahead take ‘er back.” Sitting at his metal desk, he waved us out of his office with an oven-mitt-sized hand.
“Am I the only woman here?” I asked John, following behind him like a puppy. We were heading for the ice.
He pushed a button on the wall. A metal garage door jolted into action. “We had a girl,” he said. The door clanked open, revealing the front of the Zamboni. “She’s in Spain now,” he added cryptically.
The Zamboni was right there. I had never seen one up close before. An immense red thing, high as a garbage truck, glistening wet and steaming for reasons I didn’t understand. It was wrapped, I was interested to note, in an ad for the local orthodontics clinic. The dentist is the #1 sponsor of the hockey rink? I thought. Incredible.
John walked me around the Zamboni in slow circles, explaining different functions and pointing to various parts.
“So that there–” he crouched down low and beckoned me to do the same “–that there is the auger. And here you have your conditioner, and the blade– now that’s very sharp, we just changed the blade this morning, you don’t ever want to touch that– and here’s where the hot water goes in. Here’s the cold water– we also call it wash water– and you can see here in these tanks that we use reverse osmosis water instead of city water, which makes for much clearer ice.”
I nodded and nodded. He might as well have been speaking medieval Latin.
John, patting the Zamboni, had just finished explaining something I should absolutely never do that involved the conditioner. He looked remarkably like Michael Cera; I could not stop thinking about it.
“… and if you leave it too late– if you don’t lift it in time– it’ll ruin the blade, and the floor. And the Zam,” John/Michael Cera finished. “It’s a hundred-thousand-dollar machine. We wouldn’t want that to happen.”
He looked at me expectantly.
“Definitely not,” I said. I hadn’t understood a single thing he’d said. Not one. The only thing I’d managed to grasp (with a dim, hazy feeling of growing alarm) was that this was a hugely expensive, temperamental vehicle that the ice arena could barely afford to maintain, and that it could easily be fucked up in many ways by a driver who didn’t know what they were doing.
“Definitely not,” I repeated.
“Well, hop up.”
I made the clenched-teeth emoji face John. “I’m kind of worried now? That I’ll screw it up?"
He grinned. “It’s a lot to take in. You put your foot there–” he pointed “-to get up.”
We were really doing this. What a bad idea. I hauled myself into the driver’s seat.
There was only room for one.
“ARE YOU COMING WITH ME?” I half-shrieked it, a fledgling baby bird panicking at the edge of the nest. John, standing below me, looked shockingly far away. THE ZAMBONI WAS REALLY HIGH. I was so far off the ground!
“I’ll ride along behind you, standing on the conditioner. Don’t ever stand on the conditioner, by the way. Today you’ll just be driving; I’ll do everything else.”
“OK,” I whimpered.
"Turn the key, hear that sound? Now it’s on. This is the gas; this is the brake. We never use the brake, only in emergencies. You always want to be driving forward, otherwise it can screw up the Zamboni. I want to repeat that: Never use the brake. Unless it’s an emergency.”
“How will I stop?”
“You don’t. You just ease up on the gas until it stops.”
“Oh my god.”
The Zamboni was making wild noises, big metal noises; it was shuddering, shaking. Above it all, a weird, high-pitched, electric humming noise vibrated through the air. I was astride a Thing of Power, and I was not at all sure I wanted to do this anymore.
“Put your foot on the gas,” John said. “Now push down a little.”
I pushed down. The Zamboni juddered forward, shambling towards the doorway.
“That’s it. Now put the gas to the floor. It’s gonna go faster than you think. You ready?”
“No.”
“Go.”
We shot out onto the ice.
This is hysterical. I'm trying to read it to my husband since he took some skating lessons and loves hockey, but it's tough going since I'm snort-cackling every few words. Subscribing! (GREAT blog title, by the way.)
This is so Minnesotan. (P.S. Hockey families ARE close. It's creepy.)