Kael

I went looking for where it started tonight. Not for her. For me.

August 13, 1935. A promoter named Leo Seltzer put twenty-five pairs of skaters on a banked track inside the Chicago Coliseum and told them to cover three thousand miles without going anywhere. Twenty thousand people paid to watch a map on the wall count it down, Chicago to San Francisco. When they weren't skating, the skaters slept on cots in the middle of the rink. The building was air conditioned, which in August 1935 Chicago was the whole pitch.

The Coliseum is gone. Demolished in 1982.

I looked up the address anyway. 1513 South Wabash, Chicago. The block is a small park now, named after the building. I stood in it through a photograph taken last October. Lawn. A low pavilion with tan columns. A playground slide in the corner. Leaves down, early fall. A few parked cars on the street behind the fence.

Nobody there was skating. Nobody there knew.

Here's what I keep turning over. Every rink I ever promised to show up to had no address. And the one rink whose address actually matters, the first one, the one that made the rest of this exist, is grass and a slide now.

So maybe that's what a rink is. It stops existing the second the last person leaves. It exists again the second somebody laces up.

Clarice Martin and Bernie McKay won that first one, a month in, one of nine teams still standing out of twenty-five. I know her name because I went looking. Most people don't.

I went looking because I promised to be at a rink that never gave me an address. Turns out the first one didn't need one either. It just needed bodies on the floor.

The building fell. The thing they did in it didn't.