Can a place that no longer exists remain intact in the minds of we survivors, a former house where no highway runs, a closed mom and pop grocery store, a tree we loved to climb?
This question is posed because Ronnie’s Roller Rink was so much to so many.
Debbie Dacnic owns a fine pair of roller blades. You’ll find her doing patterns of circles in parking lots about town, svelte in her black watch cap, practicing her meditations with her earbuds and mirror sunglasses. See her over in the high school parking lot, exchanging in her mind the slats of parking lines for serpentine swirls in which she travels.
Debbie wasn’t even born when Ronnie’s burned, but she listens to the stories of those whose childhoods and adolescences were shaped there. She has seen photos from the albums and even a home movie of Clark and the Upbeats rocking out. Stocking at Warhaven Building Supply after hours in her stocking feet, she glides across the aisles of the newly waxed floors, imagining the life of the rink and all of its rolling humanity.
George Ansbach was strolling from Via Valhalla, where he parked out of habit, to hike over to Warhaven Building Supply. A sky-blue Ranchero drove by, thumping bass of a guitarrón and trumpet in counterpoint, a Mexican song that immediately took him to Germany. The similarities of Mariachi and Oompah were striking to George, and he headed to the nearest bench where he sat. He felt the wave of a PTSD bout coming on, back in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where he was recuperating from his injury in Viet Nam and where he received his first psychiatric care for what many were still calling “shell shock.”
George automatically began his breathing exercises and his imagery therapy. His mind took him to Ronnie’s. George skates with his love interest, Angeline, to “A Beautiful Morning,” by the Rascals. As the scene of his fantasy becomes more precise, more detailed of sights and sounds and smells, like her Jungle Gardenia perfume, George’s heartbeat slows and his breathing steadies. Soon George returns from his soothing memories, sighing. In a minute or so, he rises and continues on his way.
A community must own up to the fact that it is its present, but also its future and surely its past. Each of us is a museum of memories. Things often get interesting when the museums interact, bisect, when memories get scrutinized, debated, even argued over. Our unique perspectives are differences to cherish.
Mayor Jacqueline “Tootie” McDaniels, plain in appearance, abrupt in style, was born in 1964, so she was 7 when Ronnie’s burned to the ground. As a small child she was especially proud of a pink tutu she wore until it was about dust. Prior to its demise, her parents Ike and Charlotte McDaniels would take her to the occasional Sunday afternoon session at the rink, where she would totter and cavort around and around, all the while her folks keeping an eye on gravity and centrifugal force.
To Tootie these skating outings were the embodiment of parental love, freedom and vigilance, and she would reminisce on this fundamental truth of hers. One city council session, just prior to convening, she found herself at Ronnie’s, arms in the air, both skates coming off the ground, a howl coming out of her mouth. While she suffered a bruised tailbone and wounded pride, she smiled, thinking, “Today kids get opioids and guns, Internet and access to the most ungodly content, devious artificial intelligence mavens, all the while social media, pretending to offer community, gives the child the hideous gift of isolation.” Wilbur Weston, from her right, nudges her. “Your honor?”
Ike Moseseek sits immediately to Tootie’s left. He too would travel back to Ronnie’s upon occasion, but with a quite different perspective. Imagine the agile Quaish boy, already showing signs of the spiritualist polymath he would become, skating backwards, swerving among skaters, offering the peace sign, smiling, pig tails down his collar bones and torso. Despite Warhaven’s stellar record on social harmony, there were those that day that saw the young athletic Native American boy as a flaunting dilettante of the skating arts, a shallow poser and not the respectful lover of life that he truly was. It was a day of gross paradox for Ike. Someone new to town called out to him, “Slow down, Cochise!” And like the Masked Avenger, Gus Chapman swoops in to intercept the offensive fellow. “Mister, that kid there ain’t Cochise! That kid’s this town’s savior, and you’d better appreciate it!” Gus snarled, and was gone.
Such is the magic that remains in the wake of Ronnie’s Roller Rink. If you sit still and listen, you too can feel the energy swirling about you. Memories of things past are tangible realities.
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The City Council is a work of fiction, written by Jim Tindall, appearing every other week in Columbia Gorge News.
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