The Backyard Rink

What a Year Away Taught Us About Home

It’s normally right around Thanksgiving when Minnesotans formally say goodbye to their neighbors for the year. Snow begins to accumulate. The cold settles in. Darkness starts arriving before dinner. If all goes well, we’ll meet again in the middle of the street sometime in late March and recap what a doozy the past five months have been. Until then, being neighborly mostly means offering a brief wave through snow suits and ski masks as our snowblowers hurl snow into the ever-growing banks along the curb.

Eventually, you learn to embrace winter and reorganize life around it. Motorcycles become snowmobiles. Mountain bikes become fat tire bikes. Trail shoes become cross-country skis. Lacrosse cleats become hockey skates. Fishing boats become ice houses. There’s a pride to it all. Like learning to thrive in conditions most people would avoid.

For my family, a centerpiece of our winters became the backyard hockey rink. I grew up on them and decided we needed one in our backyard despite having no hockey players in the house at the time. Build it and they will come was my motto. And it worked.

The rink became a community gathering place. My kids and many of our neighborhood kids took their first skating strides there. Team practices often spilled back onto our rink for hours afterward. As the evenings stretched on, burgers hit the grill, parents gathered around the boards, and the rink stayed busy long after dark. Other days, I’d come home from work to noise out back and find the neighborhood girls had taken over the rink.

And I enjoyed maintaining the rink. Many late evenings were spent repairing ice worn down by storms or hours of skating. There was something peaceful about standing alone under the dark sky and rink lights watching warm water from the hose smooth over a sheet of ice I had just brought back to life.

The winter of 2022–23 produced almost 90 inches of snow in our area, with the last of it falling in mid-April. It was the third snowiest winter on record. The constant swings between snow, slush, and refreezing were enough to make even the most dedicated backyard rink owners question their sanity.

It’s normal for Minnesotans to become a little irrational by spring. Winter-weary and rink-worn, I posed a question to my wife: with so many places to live, why are we here?

There were obvious answers to that question. We were living in the house we had dreamed of building. Our kids loved their friends and we had great neighbors. Our extended family, including my aging parents, lived nearby. The schools, sports, and community were exceptional. Miles of biking and hiking paths connected nearly everything around us. And despite the winters, Minnesota is an incredible place for people who love the outdoors.

Each of those answers created its own list of reasons not to move. Why walk away from a good life? But that prompted the next question. How do we know it’s good if we’ve never experienced anything different?

I also wondered what our kids would learn from never leaving. Most people stay relatively close to their families. And if our kids never lived anywhere else, would they ever truly choose Minnesota? Or would they simply inherit it by default?

Our kids had only known one version of life. Big schools. Organized sports. Long winters. Suburban routines. So had we.

Childhood naturally feels slower because everything is new. But somewhere along the way, adulthood becomes so routine that life starts to speed up.

I wasn’t necessarily searching for something better. I think I was searching for disruption before too many years slipped by unnoticed.

I started looking for places to live that fit a long list of criteria that seemed unlikely to all exist in one place: four seasons, milder winters, maximum sunshine, a population around 100,000, strong schools, an outdoor culture, and easy access to lakes and mountains.

Cities like Bozeman, Boulder, Fort Collins, Boise, and Asheville all showed up. But we kept coming back to Bend. It was a mountain town with a river running through it that seemed to move at a slower pace. Skiing, mountain biking, hiking, and paddleboarding were all minutes away. There was even a hockey rink and a youth hockey association.

We traveled to Bend several times before making the decision, including visits with the kids during winter and spring break. Back home, we held family meetings in the living room and talked through schools, hockey, friends, grandparents, weather, and what life there might look like. Convincing kids who were happy and rooted that something worth discovering was on the other side wasn't easy.

In the end, all five of us finally agreed: we were going to move.

Two moments from the move were especially hard.

The first was leaving our driveway. Two SUVs pulling loaded trailers. We drove slowly past neighbors standing outside, some in tears, waving goodbye.

About a mile in, with just Beau and me in the car, we stopped at a red light. Normally stoic like his mom, he started to choke up before crying.

“I know this will be good for us,” he said. “But I can’t believe I may never see some of my friends again. I spent my whole life making those friendships.”

The second moment came on the first day at new schools.

The afternoon before, we sat together as a family on our back porch, surrounded by Oregon pines, talking with our kids about how to make conversation with new classmates. Bree and Beau, entering 8th and 10th grade, were stepping into more established social groups in a smaller town. We figured Zach, heading into 4th grade, would have an easier time.

As Megan and I did our best to be positive, Bree, quick-witted and never one to hold back what she was thinking, finally said, “This is easy for you guys to say. We’re the ones who actually have to go do it.”

Dropping them off at separate schools the next morning and watching them walk in was gut-wrenching. At the same time, I knew moments like this were probably part of the reason we moved.

Each of them adjusted differently, but they all settled in. School and fall sports began to connect all of us to the community. Because Bend had grown so rapidly, many people were relatively new themselves, which made the town feel especially welcoming.

We regularly rode Phil’s Trail, one of the country’s premier mountain biking trail systems, just minutes from our house. The Deschutes River became part of everyday life — we floated it, cold plunged in it, hiked and biked alongside it, and watched surfers ride the standing wave. When winter arrived, Mount Bachelor was twenty minutes away, and before long the older kids were taking a bus to the mountain on their own. Zach started spending two days a week snowboarding with a local club. And Megan and I would sneak up there on weekdays where it felt like we had the mountain to ourselves.

Because none of us had really built lives there yet, something unexpected happened: we spent a lot of time together. Most nights we ate dinner as a family and caught up on everyone’s day. There were fewer separate plans, fewer obligations, and less rushing from place to place.

For the first time in our lives, the start of hockey season was weather-dependent because the rink relied on cold temperatures to keep the ice in. The Pavilion in Bend was unlike any rink we had experienced before — a modern, covered structure mostly open to the mountain air and weather. Fire pits at one end allowed people to watch the rink activity while sitting beside a fire.

Because it was the only rink in town, the ice had to be shared across figure skating, curling, adult hockey, rec hockey, and travel hockey. With limited ice availability, very few games were played in town. Practices for travel teams started as early as 6 am. In some ways it was nice having hockey done before school and our evenings left open.

Bend also sits a bit on an island in Central Oregon, so most team sports require travel.

I remember picking up one of Beau’s teammates early in the season for a weekend practice and game in Medford. It was a little over a three-hour drive, and I made a comment about driving that far for just a couple of hours of ice.

His response became an early indicator of the season ahead.

“This will be the shortest drive we make all year.”

The season took us through cities all over the West. Some places, like McCall, Idaho, a small mountain town built around a lake with a rink right in the heart of downtown, felt almost magical in winter.

Beau’s team played games during the day and snowboarded in the mountains outside Wenatchee at night. On one trip north, a dad on Bree's girls' team flew Megan and Bree in his small plane toward Vancouver, right over Mount Hood with Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier in view.

With all three kids on separate travel teams and Bree also playing with a boys team, all five of us were often heading in different directions, and one of the kids usually had to be chaperoned by another family. Megan and I were almost never together on weekends. One weekend we had three hotels, two rental cars, and plane tickets for all five of us. Megan was in one city and I was bouncing between two others. We didn’t see each other until Sunday night. Most of our communication consisted of text updates on game scores, highlights, and moments we wished the other had been able to see.

Once back home, there was always a scramble to unpack, reset, and spend a little time together before the next weekend arrived and we scattered again.

It was a hockey season our kids will never forget. Ask almost any kid what they remember most about great hockey seasons and it’s usually the tournaments and camaraderie surrounding them. For our kids, they were living out of hotels, rinks, and mountain towns almost every weekend.

Near the end of the season, Megan and I went out on one of our morning hikes, and I told her how earlier that morning, our digital photo frame had rotated to a picture from one of Zach’s hockey games back in Minnesota. All of us were sitting together in the stands, including my dad, while Zach defended a breakaway in goal. The photographer stood directly in front of us while taking the picture, and every single one of us had shifted our heads to see around her so we wouldn’t miss the play.

We had a family to be a family, and somewhere along the way it no longer felt like we were operating as one.

We sat down together to explore adjustments that could change this, including having the older two shift toward local winter sports on the mountain.

We loved many of the things Bend offered — the smaller town, slower pace, mountain views, and the constant draw to be outdoors. Had we raised our kids there from the beginning, it would have been a wonderful place to call home.

But our kids had grown up playing hockey, and none of them were willing to give that up to ease the travel. It wasn’t that they were protecting some future hockey career. They loved playing the sport and being part of a team. And if hockey is going to be a major part of your lives, Minnesota is a pretty great place to do it while staying together as a family.

We returned to Minnesota that summer. I’m grateful for the collective willingness to leave the safety and familiarity of our lives to try something adventurous together.

But leaving also gave me a deeper appreciation for what we already had.

In many ways, Beau understood something before I did that day as we pulled out of our neighborhood.

“I spent my whole life making those friendships.”

Moving made me realize how much of life had been built over decades. When my brother says he just got a new sauna, I love that I can sit in it with him the next morning. A last-minute text from an old friend asking if I want to grab coffee. The invitation to go mountain biking with my college roommate. Seeing my mom on her birthday. Watching my dad rub one of his grandkids on the head after hockey and tell them, “Good game kiddo.”

We recently purchased our first home back in Minnesota in a new neighborhood where we'll begin building community all over again.

One of the main criteria in the home search was a flat backyard.

Not for resale value or landscaping.

For a backyard hockey rink.