EDINA, Minn. - Some men obsess over their backyard landscaping. Phil Schimke takes a Minnesota approach: Just ice it over.
“When I bought this house the first thing I thought when I looked in the backyard: Ice rink,” says Phil, smiling broadly.
His rink covers nearly every square foot of his modest backyard. Just a narrow border remains around the edges as a place to pile up snow.
Phil wasn't born wearing skates, but almost.
“These skates were my mom’s when she figure skated with the Minneapolis Figure Skating Club in 1942-43,” Phil explains as he points to a pair of well-worn skates hanging on the warming house wall near his rink.
“I love the sound of the sticks and skates and the pucks,” he says. It’s the soundtrack really, of Phil’s life.
As boys, Phil and his brothers skated on a rink beside their South Minneapolis home.
“My whole growing up, we had an ice rink,” he says.
As a teen, Phil skated for Washburn High School.
Phil’s wife, Nicole, still remembers the hockey equipment bag he always carried in his car when they were dating, to allow for a quick breakaway to a game or practice.
While out of town, years after the couple married, Nicole received a phone call from Phil.
“He called me and said, ‘Please don't divorce me, but I've cut a hole in the garage and we’re going to have a warming house.’”
The car sits outside in the street, as children enter and exit side of the garage turned warming house with sticks and pucks.
It’s the same warming house in which Phil is sitting when he picks up a toddler hockey skate from a bin in the corner. “This was the first pair we bought for our son Alex,” he says.
Alex, like his father, was born swaddled in hockey. Indeed, one of Alex’s earliest photos shows his tiny head poking through an adult-size Minnesota North Stars jersey.
If life were fair, Alex would be on his father’s prized rink right now, on a breakaway with the neighborhood kids giving chase.
“But, he never really mastered skating,” says Phil. “And then when he was about four, that's when we found out he had fragile X syndrome.”
Alex is 16 now and diagnosed with both autism and fragile X syndrome, a genetic mutation that hinders his talking, interacting and learning.
He makes noises but forms few words. Anxiety and social aversion keep Alex inside for the most part while the neighborhood kids are on the rink.
Phil and Nichole have made peace with their son’s condition, but his father concedes the beginning of the journey was tough. “We lost our child,” he says. “Everything you think you're going to have.”
Phil’s hours maintaining the rink is time Nicole must care for Alex, but she brushes aside any resentment.
“There's still a little kid in him,” she says. “That's what he does, I think, to make him feel better.”
Phil’s rink has become a magnet attracting the neighborhood children. They lace up in the warming house after school and skate into the evening under the lights.
Phil is often on skates in their midst, scraping the ice with a shovel or grabbing a stick to join in a pick-up hockey game.
“It's good therapy,” he says. But it goes beyond that.
Phil and Nicole’s daughter, Vivian, is a frequent user of the rink as well. It’s not always easy being the sibling of a child with special needs and the rink has become a special place for Vivian and her friends.
Phil believes Alex, however withdrawn, gains something from having the neighborhood kids on the rink too.
“He can hear them and he can see them,” Phil says. “I like to have kids around him. I don't want him to be forgotten and be alone, so in a way, I'm trying to bring kids to him to be around him as much as I can.”
On rare days when Alex does feel like coming outside, there's never a doubt the rink will be ready.
Daily, his father floods the rink to keep it in pristine skating condition.
“It's like I'm working on my artwork,” says Phil, holding a garden hose under a rising moon as water splashes on the frozen surface.
Leave it to the glow off fresh ice to make the whole world seem brighter.
