Laughing at Ice Skating Crime

I am thinking that only a bad person laughs at crime, and that bad person would be me! I admit however that I chuckled out loud when I read that two young men in the Chicago area connected a hose to a nearby fire hydrant and 26,000 gallons of water later they had a skating rink in their own back yard. It made me think of all the harebrained schemes we dreamed up as kids, and I certainly think I could have gotten involved in this one!

One year when I was a small child I got a pair of ice skates for Christmas. My dad (using a hose connected to our house, not a fire hydrant) flooded our side yard to make me a skating rink. It was a little bumpy, but how I loved that rink! I skated around the rose bushes and the grape vines and sometimes my friends joined me.  I had dreams of becoming a famous skater one day, and was thrilled to think that every winter I could have my own private sheet of ice.

Unfortunately my ice skating career was nipped in the bud when the spring thaw moved that melting ice directly into our basement in the form of a flood! Somehow I don't remember ever seeing it, probably because the water went promptly down the drains. Unfortunately my mother--who enjoyed our very dry basement that never filled with water--became quite hysterical, for what reason I never figured out why. A small flood seemed to me a perfectly sensible price to pay for a private skating rink, where the mean local boys never lobbed a snowball at my head. It was my only private rink, ever, and I spent many hours in the next few years dreaming of another side yard rink.

What I don't understand about the story of the youths stealing the water is that it is too warm for the water to freeze. Maybe it is colder in Tinley Park. It certainly seems that using hydrant water would be very efficient, rather than having to use a garden hose like my dad did. Unfortunately, the two young men who helped themselves to the hydrant water will likely be fined and pay about $130 for the water. I do say that, like my ice skating rink, the price and the fine seem very reasonable for ice skating all winter long.