Ben down-shifts his leaky Bronco past a series of rain-spattered signs at the Canadian border. Open lanes at a curling club in Surrey, British Columbia await us, but only if Ben’s truck can make it there by 4:30 p.m.

It’s a ‘68 Bronco, with most of it’s original parts, including vacuum windshield wipers. I pull on a nozzle at the top of the passenger-side window; ‘hiss!’, a short burst of air shoots through a rubber tube as wipers smear dirty water across the window.

“Hmm,” I say, straining to see where we are. A bright yellow arrow shines through the smear, and Ben wills his Montana-plated beast toward the border guard’s kiosk.

“What’s your citizenship?” a young, female border guard says for the thousandth time that day.

“United States,” Ben says.

“What’s your reason for visiting Canada today,” she says, eyeing our beards and shabby clothes. We’d fit right in at a pot-smokers convention or Deadhead reunion, but we’re not headed there today.

“We’re going curling!” Ben says happily. I beam at her from my seat.

“Ah,” she says, skeptically. “Do you do that often then?”

“It’s our first time,” we harmonize.

After a few more questions, she rolls her eyes at us and lets us on through, confirming any belief she might harbor concerning the peculiarity of Americans.

Maybe we are weird, but strangeness is relative. Canada has always felt like a weird place to me, like a part of Disneyland: Enter Canadaville, home of ice sports and underage drinking, British accents and high tea, tolerated prostitution and marijuana. Curling is indicative of the multitude of differences between us and our neighbors to the north.

Curling is not popular in the United States, probably because to us it looks dorky and it’s on the ice. When we want to look dorky and slide around in funny shoes, we go bowling. In Canada, where they are good at curling, it’s not dorky at all — it’s intense. It may not be the NBA finals, but people are into it. At the women’s world championships the crowd oscillated from expectant golf-like hushes to ravenous Canadian caterwauling in support for their team.

We are mostly going for the hell of it, and to get a kick or two out of Canadian culture, but I am also curious as to why curling is so popular in B.C. I figured the way to really understand would be to curl myself.

I recap what I know about curling to Ben. “So, there’s a team of four people with these special shoes that help them slide on the ice. There’s two teams of them, and they each take turns sliding flat rocks down the length of the ice toward a target.”

“Like shuffleboard?” Ben asks.

“Sure. Shuffleboard. But on ice, and with brooms,” I say. “With the brooms they sweep really hard in front of the stone, and the stone hopefully lands in the middle of the target. Closest one to the middle of the target when everybody’s done throwing the rocks gets a point. Oh, and you get to bump other people’s stones out of the way.”

“And we have to have special shoes for this?” Ben asks. I shrug.

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