Winter Village icy-hot new thing in town

Viewpoint by Judah Breitbach

My feet seemed to have grown wings and flown from beneath me. 

My rear end hit the ground hard. I needed to sit down anyway to snap on my skates before hitting the ice.

My seven-year-old brother was begging me to go to the ice rink at the Port Angeles Winter Village. 

After the incessant begging that adolescent males are wont to do, I told him I’d take him on a Tuesday, so it wouldn’t be so busy. 

We had five different Tuesdays to choose from as the rink was open from Black Friday until the sixth of January — and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to nine post meridian on Sundays, thank you very much. 

We finally settled on a Tuesday and headed to the ice rink, right across from Odyssey Bookstore, on Front Street, to burn a hole in my wallet the size of a day’s skating for an adult and minor. 25 dollars, to be exact. 

After leveraging the orange rental blades on his feet, we scrambled onto the ice. 

He gracefully glided to the center of the rink and did a triple salchow. 

At least, that’s how it felt given his mastery of the skates in comparison to my floundering. 

I checked the bottoms to see if I had been given a defunct pair, hmm, seems to be in order. 

A mustachioed man flew past me, shards of ice rooster-tailing behind him. 

I’ll get the hang of things in a moment and be right there with him, I thought determinedly. 

A little girl in a pink tutu cut me off and I fell, otherwise I might have caught him up, such was my doggedness. 

Like Icarus flying ever higher I sprinted forward, the tendons in my knees yelped in displeasure.

Shades of pink fell in slivers across the striations of the ice; the sun was setting, and so was our fun. 

The punk gave a half-hearted complaint that he wasn’t done. 

I told him my ego was, so we left for some hot cocoa.