With apologies and all due respect to my Canadian friends and relatives, I have never had the remotest interest in hockey. I’ve tried to watch it a few times, but always found it tedious and hard to follow. Even though the pace of the game is often frantic, there is typically a lot of time between goals, during which I can rarely tell where the puck actually is. Where confrontations between players seem to be the most exciting part of the game for many fans, I don’t enjoy watching people knock each other around. There is, however, another popular Canadian sport that involves sliding objects around on ice: curling. Unlike hockey, curling moves at a fairly slow pace and doesn’t require protective gear.

Stones Without Sticks
When I first heard a description of curling, it sounded too weird and dull to attract my interest. But the first time I saw curling on TV, I had a revelation. “Oh,” I thought, “it’s just like boules on ice.” There is a class of games, including lawn bowling, bocce, boules, shuffleboard, and (in some cases) marbles, that all have the same basic idea in common. Taking turns, competitors launch (throw, roll, or slide) a projectile (ball or puck) toward a target. After several rounds, the player or team with the projectile closest to the target wins; a large part of the strategy is displacing your opponent’s projectiles while protecting your own. I don’t have a name for this general type of game, but once I realized curling fit into this familiar category, I warmed to it considerably.

Although curling is, at a high level, similar to these other games, it is nevertheless unique in several ways. For starters, it’s the only one played on ice. A curling rink will have one or more playing surfaces, which are sheets of ice 146 feet (44.5m) long by 14 feet 2 inches (4.3m) wide. At the end of each sheet is a circular bull’s–eye-like target painted under the ice, consisting of a ring 12 feet (3.7m) in diameter with two smaller concentric rings and an inner circle called the tee, which is the ultimate objective. The projectiles are granite stones (sometimes called rocks) about 12 inches (30.5cm) in diameter and weighing up to 44 pounds (20kg). Handles on the tops of the stones enable the players to control them. Each team consists of four players, and each player has two stones. Starting at one end of the ice, a player will “throw” (slide) the stone toward the target. Teams alternate until all the stones have been thrown, at which point the score is counted. Only stones partially or completely within the outer ring of the target can be scored. The team with the stone closest to the tee wins that end (or round), collecting one point for each of their stones that’s closer to the center than any of the opposing team’s stones. After eight or ten ends, the team with the highest score wins.

Throwing a Curve
Whence the name curling? The stones have a tendency to curve, or curl, as they slide down the ice, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has gone bowling. Because of imperfections in the surface of the stone and the ice, some amount of curl is inevitable, but by putting a deliberate spin on the stone as it’s thrown, players can control the direction and extent of the curl and use it to their advantage. But the stone’s fate is not sealed as soon as it’s thrown. As the stone slides toward the target, one or two players will slide in front of it, sweeping the ice vigorously with small brooms or brushes. To a casual observer this may appear goofy or even pointless, but it’s a crucial part of the game. By brushing the ice, the sweepers are actually polishing it, giving the stone a smoother surface to slide on and thus extending its range. Sweeping can also influence the direction of the stone somewhat. So by skillful sweeping, players can aim a stone with great precision, making the competition much more complex.

The origin of curling is lost in the mists of time, but some form of the sport has been around since at least the mid-1500s; versions of curling have been known for centuries in Scotland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in northern Europe. In any case, it was Scotland where the game matured and achieved popularity, and where you can still find the highest number of curlers per capita. Curling is extremely popular in Canada and parts of the United States, too, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and a number of European countries. As early as 1924, curling made an appearance at the Olympics as a demonstration sport, but it did not achieve status as an official, medal event until 1998.

Curling Culture
Curling is not just a game; there’s an entire culture built up around the sport. For one thing, it’s a highly social event, and in areas where curling is popular, it is often seen as a focal point of community life. Curling clubs have much the same feel as bowling leagues; most people play not to become international stars but for the sheer fun of friendly competition. (Another inevitable comparison to bowling: special shoes. Curlers usually have one slippery shoe to glide on, and one with traction for control.) At local and regional levels, curling is ordinarily not refereed; decisions on scoring and penalties are made between the two teams on the basis of fairness and good sportsmanship. After a game, opposing teams typically join in a social gathering known as “broomsticking.”

Curlers play to win, of course, but the spirit of curling puts honor and relationships above winning and losing. Naturally there are exceptions, but curling is about as far as you can get from the ruthless competition of highly commercial sports. For better or worse, curling is not the most engaging spectator sport; it has been compared to watching a chess match. But like chess, underneath the simple rules is a subtle and deeply strategic game. Its main piece of equipment tells the whole story: curling rocks. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Curling...

The precise rules of curling, including the dimensions of the playing surface, vary somewhat from country to country and depending on the level of play (a local league will have different rules from a national competition, and Olympic curling is different still). The information in this article is based on standard Canadian rules.

Just about everything you could want to know about curling, including rules, strategies, equipment, and more, can be found at CurlTech’s online Curling School. The Curling Basics Web site contains Flash animations of a number of curling techniques, which explain a lot more than words can.

There are a number of curling organizations both large and small; among the biggest and best-known are the World Curling Federation and the Canadian Curling Association. Curling also has a page on the International Olympic Committee site.

If you want to purchase curling supplies online, see The Curling Store (located in London, Ontario, Canada—watch for shipping costs!).

Looking to expand your curling library? Start with Curling for Dummies by Bob Weeks, and also consider Curling: The History, The Players, The Game by Warren Hanson.

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If you ask the average person to name any three countries that have rain forests, chances are their minds will jump to tropical regions—Central and South America, equatorial Africa, or the islands of southeast Asia. Most people would not include, say, Canada on their lists, because as everyone knows, rain forests are consistently hot places. And this is exactly what I always believed too. Several years ago when I was living in Canada, my wife, Morgen, mentioned in passing, “Oh, we’ve got rain forests here.” And I thought: “Yeah, right. And deserts too. What else did Santa Claus tell you?” But it seems Mr. Kringle was right after all. Canada does indeed have rain forests—just not of the tropical variety, which was the only kind I had ever heard of. (As a matter of fact, there are also deserts in Canada…but that’s a story for another day.)

Moisten and Seal
The main thing that determines whether a forest should be considered a rain forest is the amount of rainfall it receives—generally, the threshold is about 100 inches (2.5m) per year. This high moisture content—concentrated still further into fog by the leaves that form the canopy—encourages the heavy growth of plants, which in turn support animal life. When evergreen forests appear along the coast of a landmass with mountains on the other side, the mountains tend to trap the moist air blowing in from the sea, producing an unusually heavy rainfall in the forest. Voilà: rain forest. Such conditions exist in several parts of the world, including the west coast of North America (from Alaska as far south as northern California), the west coast of Chile, parts of Tasmania and New Zealand, and even a small patch of Norway.

Temperate rain forests are, on average, much cooler than tropical rain forests, and also subject to greater seasonal variations. Summer temperatures may go as high as only 80°F (27°C), and in the winter, the temperature may occasionally dip below freezing. But the weather is not the only thing that’s different. Temperate rain forests support a narrower variety of plant and animal life. Canopy trees include evergreens such as Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and Douglas fir, and some deciduous trees as well. Where a tropical rain forest would overflow with vines and climbing plants, a temperate rain forest has a profusion of ferns, moss, and lichens. (Having visited both tropical and temperate rain forests, I was amused to see an old episode of The X-Files whose opening scene was set in the rain forests of Costa Rica—but, having been filmed near Vancouver in a temperate rain forest, all the vegetation was completely wrong.)

In a tropical rain forest, most of the animal life makes its home in the canopy—not just birds but monkeys, sloths, snakes, and a variety of insects. In a temperate rain forest, by contrast, most of the animal life is on or near the ground. There’s a smaller and less exotic variety of animals, too, although a great deal of the animal life consists of insects that are normally unseen, living in rotting logs from huge fallen trees.

Mass Quantities
But even if there is less diversity of animal and plant life, the sheer quantity is much greater than in a tropical rain forest—or anywhere else on Earth, for that matter. Scientists estimate that each acre (0.4 hectare) of temperate rain forest contains 500 to 2000 tons of biomass (i.e., living matter), versus an average of about 300 tons in a tropical rain forest. Most of this difference is due to the sheer size of the trees, whose average diameter is much greater than what you’d find in hotter regions.

What I find most interesting about temperate rain forests is simply that they exist—it was a bit of a shock to my system of categorizing the world to discover that rain forests are not strictly tropical phenomena. I must say, too, that temperate rain forests are much more comfortable to visit—fewer flying insects, poisonous animals, and so on, not to mention more tolerable temperatures—although you don’t get to see all the brightly colored birds, howling monkeys, and other exotic animals that are typical of the tropical rain forest.

Alas, temperate rain forests are disappearing just as quickly as their tropical counterparts—in part due to the fact that their gigantic trees make such excellent lumber. But if there is a bright side of this sort of deforestation, it is that temperate rain forests are able to regenerate much more quickly after heavy logging than a tropical rain forest could. And for North Americans, at least, they’re much handier as an ecotourist destination, which could provide another reason to keep them intact. —Joe Kissell

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