Skating on Thin Ice

Curmudgeon set his sights on Thompson Arena s beloved Zamboni as an environmental evil. Turns out there were a few cracks in his argument.

Ifyou've read this column before, you know there's a sub-species of curmudgeon—I belong to it—that could be called the enviro-mudgeon. We reserve 90 percent of our grumbles and our I-told-you-so's for what we perceive as threats to the environment. We can perceive them, sometimes, when other people just see a picturesque event.Take a recent example. One day a few months ago, an extraordinary sight appeared in the American sky. A Lear jet was flying steadily west with no one at the controls. Inside were two dead pilots and four dead passengers. The plane itself was on autopilot. And around it, like an escort, swirled a little knot of Air National Guard fighter planes.

Now that's a macabre sight. It easily beats O.J. Simpson in a white Bronco. The normal response is to be fascinated. And the normal professorial response is to link that death plane with other uncanny craft, such as the ghost ship called "The a Flying Dutchman," the subject of a Wagner opera. Or with that larger ghost ship, the one with 200 corpses on deck, that Coleridge describes in "The Rime of the Ancient Marinor."

But fascination is not the response of enviro-mudgeons. Neither is literary allusion. We're too busy grousing about those fighter planes. We know that jets like these burn a gallon of fossilfuel about every two seconds. (We wouldn't be enviromudgeons if we thought otherwise.) They drink energy so fast that they require a tanker plane up there with them to refuel in mid-flight.

And what does all this buzzing around accomplish? Only one thing. The fighters and the tanker are doing their bit to ensure that present Dartmouth students will live to see the end of the Age of Abundant Fossil Fuel. Well, there'll still be plenty of coal, mostly high-sulfur, but it's hard to imagine a couple of hundred million coal-burning cars on U.S. roads.

That's all background. Now we come at last to Dartmouth's ice-resurfacing machine, the beloved Zamboni, and to an enviro-mudgeon with both feet firmly in his mouth. Every once in a while I go to a sporting event. When I do, it's as likely as not to be a hockey game. Partly that's because I like the speed—F-15s could hardly get across the rink much faster— and partly it's because I'm fond of the women's hockey coach, Judy Parish '91. (You may omit the grin. She and her husband, Kip Oberting '91, are farm neighbors of mine, and I'm equally fond of both.) I like to watch her team.

In common with the rest of the crowd, I also like to watch the Zamboni. It works visible miracles. Judy once told me that some small children come to games just to worship the Zamboni, and they barely notice the game.

But though I too gaze rapdy, I wouldn't be an enviro-mudgeon if I didn't wonder occasionally if it's really agoodidea,inan enclosed rink, to have a gasoline machine chugging round and round, polluting as it goes. Thompson Arena is an enclosed rink. Thompson has a gasoline-powered Zamboni.

I asked two smart students, Amy DiLuna 'OO and Stephanie Edwards '00, to look into the history of Zambonis and sickness. Well! Soon I learned of 116 high school hockey players, cheerleaders and band members who, in the winter of 1989, came down with a respiratory disease called skaters' cough. Caused by Zambonis, in vestigators decided.

I also learned of a 1994 testing of 70 New England skating rinks, which revealed that 42 had unacceptable levels of air pollution. Same cause. And I learned what Dr. Francois Desbiens, Quebec's chief public health officer, had to say about the matter. Attending a hockey game is "like standing in your garage with the car running," he declared in 1996.

And I discovered another Boston-area study from 1998. It covered 19 rinks.Most of them had bad air. Why? The evidence pointed so clearly to the exhaust fumes of ice-resurfacing machines that four of the 19 got rid of their old gas or propane burners and bought new electric Zambonis even before the study was complete.

What does an enviro-mudgeon do when he hears news like this? He looks for the nearest white horse and gallops off to do battle with the forces of pollution. I had my feet in the stirrups at once.

Only it turned out there were no forces of pollution in Thompson. And it turned out the College has been ahead of me every step of the way.

No one here has come down with skaters' cough (which you get by breathing nitrogen dioxide). No one gets hockey headaches (from carbon monoxide) or hockey lung (from unidentified air pollution). Judy, in her 11 years here, first as a student and then as coach, has never encountered a single case of any of these maladies. My feet were rising rapidly from the stirrups toward my mouth.

Yes, Dartmouth owns a gasoline Zamboni. Yes, the Zamboni emits stuff like nitrogen dioxide. But Thompson is so lofty and Thompson has such good ventilation that the air in there is just fine.

That's no mere reassuring guess, either. As Josh Mac Arthur, the College's rinkmaster, told me, we had the air in Thompson tested about two years ago. Actually, the test was designed for Leverone Field House "because there are many more vehicles in and out of there on a daily basis," according to MacArthur. Since the testers were here anyway, the College decided to test Thompson as well. It passed with flying colors.

Now let me go back to Coleridge. The main action of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is that the central character becomes "a sadder and wiser man." I'm not sadder because Thompson is clean; I'm gladder. But I hope to become enough wiser so that I'll check and make sure that a problem really exists before I start rushing in with solutions.

The Icy LeagueA fuelish look at Ivy League ZambonisBrown Electric Zamboni Columbia No ice, no Zamboni Cornell ..Propane Olympia Dartmouth Gasoline Zamboni Harvard Electric Zamboni Penn Two propane Zambonis Princeton Electric Zamboni Yale Two propane Zambonis