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I went out for a walk on the bitter-cold streets of Stockholm later that day, and I saw workmen putting plastic pipe under the stone blocks that made up the sidewalk, and I had no idea what I was seeing because it was 1990, and the concept of melting snow with plastic pipes was not something I had ever considered. I watched them for a good long time, and I wondered.
I remember asking a woman how they could afford to melt all that Swedish snow and she said, “If we didn’t do it, people might slip and fall on the ice, and that would be terrible.” And I remember thinking that Sweden is a country with cradle-to-grave socialism, and twelve-dollar beers, and ten-dollar Big Macs, and that everyone there is a little bit crazy because they melt snow. I was so young then. Last summer, my friend, Matt “Mad Dog” Sweeney, who has more enthusiasm than the entire staff of Disney World, talked to me about a snowmelt project that he had just landed from a wealthy man on Long Island’s Gold Coast. It was Mad Dog’s first, and he wanted some practical guidance from someone who had done a lot of this. I sent him to Mark Eatherton, Colorado Madman, because Mark has done more of this than anyone I know. Mark and Mad Dog emailed each other for a while and then Mad Dog laid his pipe and set his boilers, and then he spent the rest of the summer, and all of the fall, hoping it would work when the time came. And there’s not a person in this business who has ever done snowmelt that didn’t go though this same process. The logical mind just doesn’t believe any of this is possible.
There are 38 miles of radiant tubing under the field at Gillette Stadium. It’s not there to melt snow; it’s there to keep the roots warm so that the grass will do what it had done during the previous two weeks, which is to think that it’s July. The tarp, I learned, is a solar tarp, and it helps as well, but it’s the warm roots that really get the job done. A guy came out on a mower and rode for a few hours.
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A few days later, I found myself in a town called Västeras. I sat and listened to Mr. Engel talk about the technical journey from polyethylene to what he came to call PEX, and it was a wonderful story. So much of this was brand-new to me back then. And later that day, I walked around the little town that is Västeras in the snows of December and I marveled at how the flakes landed on the sidewalks and the streets and not one of them stuck.
They kept peeling off that tarp at Gillette Stadium, two days ahead of the big game with Miami, and when they got to the middle of the field, the part that had been chewed to pieces two weeks earlier in a football war, they pulled back the tarp to reveal summer-green grass that needed a good mowing. My jaw dropped. And I smiled.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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