Tommy Washbush
Many curlers on curling ice in Arlington.
League play for the season wrapped up in late February at the Arlington Curling Club.
It’s Thursday night at the Arlington Curling Club. The old cream brick building sits next door to the EMS station just off County Road I about a 20-minute drive north of Madison. Teams are filing off the ice from the first round of games. Players, some of whom wear vests adorned with colorful curling pins, make their way into the clubhouse, where two-dollar taps flow and the aroma of frozen pizzas bubbling inside a giant pizza oven fills the air. My team is scheduled to play at 8:15 p.m.
If you had told me 10 years ago that I’d be on a curling team, I would have advised you to cut down on the pharmaceuticals. Actually 10 years ago would have been a good time to start, because the sport is a lot harder to master than it seems. To curl is to crouch and by crouch I mean to fold your body into a position that was invented by a sadistic yoga coach having a bad day. It’s a squat with a one foot push-off that, somehow, and I guess it’s because of the ice and all, sends you sliding forward. Getting into the position is an athletic feat unto itself. Then comes pushing the 38-pound rock while you do the splits. It looks easy on TV, right? Everything looks easy on TV because you’re on the couch.
The three lanes of play are known as “sheets.” That’s where club treasurer Jene Atkinson is now preparing the surface for the next round of games. He wears a scuba-looking-tank called a “pebbler” on his back. Walking backwards, Jene wands a spray of 120 degree water mist onto the sheet. He sweeps the handle back and forth as he walks. This creates bumps or “pebbles” on the surface of the ice. After that he uses a six-foot-long metal blade to “nip” off the pebbles — the top of the little bumps — to a uniform height.
If the ice were perfectly smooth like skating ice, friction would make the heavy granite stone stop well short of midway down the lane. Instead, the stone melts the pebbles just a bit, creating enough water on the surface to keep it moving. The pebbles also make spin, or “curling,” possible.
There are some rituals that come with curling. You say “good curling” and shake hands with all four of your opponents before the game starts. Our draw tonight turns out to be the 2022 state high school boys curling finalists from Poynette.
It’s our fourth game of the season. We’re not very good. We put a lot of faith in our skip, the guy who stands down at the end of the sheet and points with his broom at where you should slide the rock.
A player also uses the broom to sweep immediately in front of a stone in flight, as needed, to warm the ice and increase the length of the slide. Of course if the stone slides out of play at the end of the sheet, well, you’ve broomed too much.
The goal is to slide all the rocks toward (and hopefully on or near) a target on one end. That’s a round or “end,” in the parlance. There are eight ends in a game. By the end of the second end, it’s the end of us. Poynette scores at will. After six ends it’s mathematically impossible for us to win, so we quit early.
Back in the lobby, the frozen pizzas are flying out of the oven. Winners buy the first round of beers in curling (losers must sweep the ice for the next match). We buy our own, since the Poynette boys are under age.
The Poynette boys ended up losing in semifinals at state this year. It’s good that we didn’t have to play the girls’ team. The Poynette girls won it all.
Year the Arlington Curling Club was founded: 1954
The first city in Wisconsin to have a high school curling team: Wausau, in the 1930s
Number of times a Wausau school won state in boys or girls curling: 22
Number of curling clubs in Columbia County: five (Arlington, Lodi, Pardeeville, Portage and Poynette)
Where and when curling first appeared: Scotland, 1600s
Official weight of a single curling stone: between 38 and 44 pounds
Longest time a stone can take to travel the sheet: 30 seconds
