Winter Sports in Switzerland

by E. F. Benson

WINTER MOONLIGHT

CHAPTER II
RINKS AND SKATERS

Something has already been said about the swift-growing jungles of frost-flowers that so speedily cause the lakes in Switzerland to be utterly useless for all purposes connected with skates. It suddenly strikes the writer that the inexperienced in these matters will have concluded that I mean that when once those frost-flowers have formed all skating is over, and that if they have gone to Switzerland for the indulgence of this taste, all that is henceforth to be offered them is the opportunity to admire this frozen vegetation instead of cutting figures. I therefore hasten to assure them that lake skating in Switzerland does not count; indeed most winter resorts have no lake at all; and even if they have, skating there is quite the exception and not the rule. In nine cases out of ten the snow spoils the ice before it bears, and the frost-flowers spoil the greater part of it, even if the snow has held off, almost immediately afterwards. Lake-skating, in fact, is of the nature of a bonus rather than a dividend: to be enjoyed if it happens, but by no means to be reckoned on.

But at every Swiss resort there are rinks made, which render the skater independent of natural surfaces of ice, and those, at all well-conducted places, are “new every morning,” because every evening they are swept and sprinkled with water, which by the ensuing day has frozen, and presents a fresh surface to the zealot. In fact, an artificial skating-rink is as necessary an equipment in the Swiss winter resort as is the hotel itself. The construction and renovation of these rinks is most interesting, and ranks among the fine arts, just as does the architecture of a fine golf-links or the preparation of good wickets. These rinks are used for two purposes: skating, including bandy or ice hockey, and curling. I do not count ice-gymkhanas or ice-carnivals, because anything is good enough for them. You can play the shovel-game or crawl through barrels among the jungles of frost-flowers. I do not imply that such entertainment is not exceedingly amusing; I only mean that the artist in rink-making paints his masterpieces primarily for the sake of the skater and the curler, not for the Pierrot with his Chinese lantern, or those who win three-legged races.

The technique of these ice-pictures is in brief as follows:

In the beginning of the creation (from the skater’s point of view) a piece of ground is carefully and accurately levelled. This, if it is to be the foundation of a well-and truly-laid rink in the ensuing winter, should be done early in the spring, because the ground will have then had time to settle down, and the inequalities which always occur in this settling can be made good, before the first frosts of the autumn begin, and the soil gets fixed and frozen. Also, so I am told, the fact that the ground will then be covered with a growth of weeds and grasses, causes the foundation of the rink to be of better quality. This is easily understandable: the base is matted, and is probably more coherent in texture and less liable to contain holes through which the water may drain away. Then, when the whole ground has been doctored, i.e. when the small inequalities have been corrected and it is as uniformly level as can be expected of anything in this shifting world, everybody sits down and smokes (as is the habit of the Swiss peasant) till the first good snowfall comes, probably in November or early in December. Then the merry peasant has to put down his pipe and work begins again.

A row of them (I am describing the most up-to-date method) stand close together with arms interlocked, in as straight a line as may be, and trample down all this beautiful fresh snow. Up and down they go, in slow time, stamping heavily with their great feet, and making out of perhaps a foot of snow some 3 or 4 inches at the most, of really compact and hard foundation. It will resemble at the best, as regards evenness, a lane over which flocks of ponderous sheep have passed; but the groundwork (this is the main point) will be of hardened snow, though extremely rough of surface. Then they may all sit down and smoke their pipes again—all, that is, except the headman and those who pull about, at his bidding, the yards of hose which at one end terminate in a brass nozzle, at the other in the water-supply, which should run in the main at high pressure. This water is then turned on to the compacted snow which gets soaked with it, and, if a few nights of hard frost follow the original snowfall, becomes gradually converted into a sort of rough but glazed and solid ice. Then, if nothing untoward happens, in the shape of thaw or further snowfall, the next step is taken. But if there is during these few days a thaw, they have to wait for more snow to fall, and do their trampling over again; while if there is more snow, the poor wretches have still to trample and get the foundations firm again. But if all goes well—and the experienced iceman will delay the original trampling until the barometer or his weather-sense (preferably the former) promises cold weather to follow—he makes his second operation. He will have built a small bank of snow perhaps 3 feet high and well-spaded down, round his rink, and have sprinkled that as well as his rink surface, so that it is at any rate glazed with ice and water-tight. Then, waiting for a bright sunny morning, he floods the whole rink with perhaps 2 inches of water. The sunniness of the day is most important for this operation: if he put on this flood on a cold day, or at evening when a frosty night was imminent, all the water he put on, lying on the cold frozen surface below, and with the frosty air above it would freeze solid without cohering to the original frozen foundation. But putting it on while the sun is hot, the top surface of the foundation is percolated with the flood, and when the frost of the night follows, the flood binds with it. One night possibly may not consolidate the flood: if it does not, he waits till another night completes the work. All the time, it must be remembered, the rink presents the most depressing appearance: little bits of frozen snow have floated up to the surface, frost-flowers perhaps have made their ill-starred appearance, and it still somewhat resembles a sheep-trampled lane. But then things begin to look better: and another inch of water is put on, and then another inch, and then another, each being consolidated before the next is applied, and each being applied not in the evening, but when the sun will slightly melt the previous surface. With each of these floodings the ice grows more desirably smooth, and more immaculately clean, till at the end of perhaps a fortnight there is something like 18 inches of solid ice over the ground that was levelled in the spring. At least this thickness is required if the ice is to last properly, for even in mid-winter the most sickening series of climatic catastrophes may occur, which, unless there is good thickness of ice originally built up, may spoil the rink altogether. For on hot sunny days, though the surface of the ice remains quite dry, very great evaporation occurs, and the dryness of the air drinks up the melted ice before it visibly or tangibly becomes water. Or again, even in the most well-conducted winters, at the most approved resorts, there may be a complete thaw, and “the pools are filled with water,” which also evaporates. In both these cases, there is a consequent loss of ice, and the bullion, so to speak, must be able to stand the drain upon it. Still worse, there may be a snowfall followed by a thaw, followed by a frost. The thaw has eaten into the ice; the frost has caused this rodent mixture to get encrusted again. And then, if there is not good depth of ice, the most excruciating events tread on each others’ heels. The ground below the thin ice is warmed with the penetrating sun, and begins to exude bubbles; the bubbles rise, and horrible water-blisters, skinned over with ice, appear. The skates crash through them (“and langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing,” as Miss Fanny Squeers said) and cut into the half-frozen ground, which thereupon begins to leak. The most awful mess ... there are no words for it. Therefore it is necessary, as soon as possible, to get a good thickness of ice.

But this building-up of the rink requires immense patience and forethought. Night after night when the building is going on, and the weather is warm and beastly, the head iceman, if he is really competent, will sit up through the long tale of dark hours, keeping himself awake with coffee, and watching the thermometer to see when it registers sufficient degrees of frost to enable him to put more water on to the ice. He will wait all through a cloudy night, hoping for the sky to clear, in order to get a half inch more foundation. It is useless and worse than useless to apply more water unless there are several degrees of frost, for this only weakens his original trampled foundation of snow, and leads to the awful trouble of blisters coming up from the ground. But if even an hour or two before daybreak the temperature sinks, and there is a chance of gaining a further thickness of ice, he will rouse his men, and at any rate spray or sprinkle the whole surface of the rink, in order to get a little more ice, just a little more. Night and day, like a mother over a sick child (I am not exaggerating), a man like Rudolf Baumann, and others not so well known to me, will watch over their rink, to console, to fill up holes, to add another fibre of underlying muscle.

But even when a couple of feet of solid ice are built up over the ground, the trouble of the iceman is not over. Again a snowfall may come, followed by a thaw, and the removal of this reveals sometimes a terrible sort of chicken-pox on the ice. If the snowfall is followed by cold weather, not much harm is done, for the snow is removed by shovels and barrows, and a sprinkle of water over the whole rink—sprinklings being made at night, since a sprinkle freezes almost as it falls, opposed to the slower habits of a flood—shows next day that the rink is no whit the worse. But if a thaw follows a snowfall, the general laws of nature are suspended, in order to thwart icemen and skaters. Theoretically, the surface of the ice below the melting snow will thaw evenly. Practically, it does nothing of the kind. The surface is unaffected in one spot, and immediately adjoining it has thawed into a small round hole about 6 inches in circumference. Why this happens I cannot say, except that it is part of the general malignity of natural law; but the effect is apparent enough, and when the thawing snow is removed, the ice is found to be covered by numberless small holes. Each one of these has to be filled up by hand, with a freezing mixture of snow and water, or better of pounded ice and water.... There are rinks in Switzerland 300 yards long—I leave the consideration of these, in the matter of labour required, to mathematicians who like dealing with progressions that approach the infinite.