This is about ice skating. I wish I could claim to be good on a pair of ice skates. But, no luck.

When I was growing up in Palouse, we were able to ice skate on the Palouse River. It would nearly freeze solid so there wasn’t much danger in falling through the ice.

I wasn’t much good because my ankles let me down, but I gave it a whirl anyway.

We had the type of skates that screwed onto your shoes. That was the state of the art, Palouse style, at the time.

Later, much later, I got regular ice skating shoes. It didn’t change my proficiency on the ice, though.

We also skated on ponds down by the hobo camp. We would build a fire and some mom would always bring some hot cocoa and we would have a blast.

Later, on a trip to Portland, I enjoyed watching skaters at the Lloyd Center. Lloyd Center was like a shopping mall with an ice skating rink. You could rent shoes, pretty much like in a bowling alley.

We gave it a whirl and stayed out of the way of true skaters.

When we lived in the Seattle area there were several places you could skate. My ankles must have improved some, because I could make it around the rink, rather than on my seat.

We lived in the Boise Valley a bit later and Sun Valley was our place to go on weekends. It was about 100 miles from Boise.

At the resort, you could eat outside under cover and watch people skate on a wonderful ice rink. That’s where the Olympic skaters trained. When the rink was open to skaters you could, for a fee, skate there.

We would order lunch, watch good skaters skate, eat our lunch and have a good time. I never skated there because the skill range was way too high for me.

I was still hiring out as a lumber grader at this time. We lived for a time at Wendle, a small town near Twin Falls, about a 100 or so miles east of Boise.

I worked at a lumber mill at Gooding, which the company I worked for used as a shipping point. It was right beside the rail line, and we would load the graded lumber in box cars.

They had a working mill up near Sun Valley and would send me up there off and on.

They sent me up there for a month one winter. It was very cold. Townspeople had dug out a large space alongside our hotel, filled the space with water, and we had an ice-skating venue next to the hotel where I stayed.

They told me about this, so I took my skates along. I skated off and on the entire month. I wasn’t much improved but there weren’t a lot of people to criticize my skating.

My boss was a pilot and had his own plane, so he would fly up from Gooding, land on the highway, and taxi into the mill.

My favorite skating place was at Sun Valley where you could relax and watch really good skaters. Next, I think, were the ponds near the hobo camp in Palouse. There, you could skate with school friends and enjoy the hot cocoa.

My skates are long gone, but the memories remain. You can skate just about anywhere if you are willing to look around.

My ankles are still a bit shaky.