On Frozen Blog

Near 11:00 a.m. yesterday, my ice rink’s management was informed of a heart-wrenching mishap: one of our skating instructors, a beautiful and popular young woman not yet married two years, lost her engagement ring somewhere in the facility, perhaps even out on the ice. She hadn’t a clue as to where. Our team and its staff fanned out through all foot traffic areas; Sarah’s instructor colleagues and many of their pupils combed the entirety of the teaching sheet of ice — Olympic-sized. At one point my management colleague Brian and I took a flashlight to the Zamboni conditioner — that eight-foot flat bed of metal that trails the Zam and conveys ice shavings vertically into the dump tank — back in the Zam bay to see if miraculously the ring had lodged itself within snow and ice and slush and some of the planet’s sharpest metal.

Zamboni as, perhaps, love mangler.

No luck.

Among misplaced or lost personal items, of course, there may be no rival in value — emotional and fiscal — to an engagement ring. This particular ring, however, carried an especially weighty search urgency: $23,000 worth. That a ring of that monetary value was fully insured did little to lesson our angst and search frenzy. If need be, the ring will be replaced by its insurance policy, but without belaboring the obvious, the replacement will carry some quiet aura of facsimile. I know not how long Sarah’s insurance company will require before declaring the ring lost and authorize its replacement — maybe that will take a full week, maybe longer. What an unimaginably awful week ahead she has.

As the search hours fruitlessly passed yesterday an aching likelihood settled in that at some point during her teaching yesterday morning Sarah removed a glove and with it her ring; it fell without notice to the ice, perhaps even hiding itself under an hour or two’s worth of blade shavings; and that at session’s end my Zam resurfacing sealed its sorry fate. I know I wasn’t culpable in any way, but I hated still my likely role in the misfortune.

And with each hour that passed yesterday the recovery likelihood evaporated. More than two thousand patrons pass through my multi-sheet skating rink on a winter weekend day, and while we’d like to think that 95 percent of them would, upon finding such a cherished emblem, rush it to management and eventually to its rightful owner, the sheer value of this particular ring suggested otherwise.

Ten or fifteen year ago, there may have been a minute chance at finding a Zam-gobbled-up valuable lodged in Zam snowbanks. But rink snowbanks are largely a thing of the past; the chemicals in modern ice require rinks to filter resurfacing dumpings, a system which ultimately delivers used rink surfaces to a country sewer system. When I first started working at an ice rink in high school my college-aged colleagues used to stash bottles of beer out back in the snowbanks, making the end of Fridays and Saturdays memorable for staff. With each tank of snow weighing in excess of 500 pounds, and Mother Nature’s melting working its own mischief, deep in spring the rink managers would often haul away a liquor store’s worth of bottled beer whose original placement had been obliterated. No such fun exists today.

That’s actually one of my favorite bits of ice rink reminiscience, but one difficult to indulge in this week because of the weekend’s misfortune.