There may not be anything more quintessentially Canadian than hitting the ice for a game of shinny in the great outdoors. The rawness of the day, the uneven ice with not a board in sight. Goal posts marked by boots and surrounded by a wide expanse behind the net....hoping friction does it's job lest you spend the entire afternoon chasing pucks. Or perhaps at any of the outdoor rinks that dotted the landscape around the city. Some with boards and proper dimensions and some were simply tennis courts flooded to allow some skating in circles while rink rats kept you from killing anyone.
I remember skating on Grenadier Pond in High Park a few times as a kid. To my young eyes a giant playground of frozen tundra surrounding a huge slab of ice where we could seemingly skate forever. Wind hard and bitter as it blew across from Lake Ontario to chill us...but not really. The joy of being outside...so primitive and so liberating dampened any thoughts of the cold. These days when I get to skate the oval here in Halifax it's nice and all but it doesn't come close to the almost euphoric rise from my youth.
Somehow in the progression from preteen years to full blown teen angst, that magical pastime was replaced by work and chasing booze and girls. That is until perhaps grade 10 or 11 when a bunch of us found ourselves climbing a fence to play shinny on an outdoor rink. I want to say it was on Martingrove Road just past Eglington but who knows really. I do know it would have been easy to see us climbing the fence but we would have been nearly invisible once on the ice. We played by moonlight and street light. Simply glorious. Our somewhat weekly ritual on a Friday night was to throw our gear over the fence and follow up with our own mad dash over the chain link barrier. These escapades harken back to climbing huge crab apple trees in the Humber valley and making ourselves sick to the stomach with how many apples we would eat. Or dangling from a cliff side chestnut tree near the hospital in the search for the perfect chestnut for our "nut" wars. No phone or tablet to entertain us...no, we lived and survived the very real possibility of serious injury or even death as we tried to remake the Gumball Rally with our BMX bikes.
It future years we made a slow progression to renting outdoor rinks for late night games and even indoor rinks with dressing rooms and zamboni's...imagine that. But these early days still remain the magical ones to me. Time has worn away the cold and the dark to be replaced by the sheer joy of a pure game of shinny. No equipment save gloves, sticks and skates. We didn't need full body armour because we weren't doing anything more than skating and passing the puck and putting it in the "net". It wasn't until our future game incarnations, when we had goalies and a net to shoot at, that equipment became necessary. There is something special to these ears to hear the cut of skates across the ice...like freshly mown grass in the summer brings me back to lazy days in the backyard watching the clouds go by, the sounds of hockey played in the great white north always brings me back to Grenadier pond or that lonely rink on the hill. Those sounds, that crisp air...and me doing my best imitation of a pylon.
Looking back one can see the progression we made from hopping fences to paying for rink time being a mirror to our own "growing up". I won't use maturing because that's the last word anyone would use when talking about our band of misfits. And as we took each step towards the warmth and regularity of an indoor rink we lost a little more of our youthful exuberance for the simple pleasure in hitting the ice. Where we once carried everything on the end of our hockey stick we now needed smelly hockey bags to contain our gear. Our innocence to the love of the simple game was slowly being replaced with making sure we had two goalies and how much everyone owed after the game so the ice time could be paid for. We were, against all the odds, growing up.
Years later, while living in Lunenburg I managed to get myself back on the ice with a good bunch of people on Wednesday nights. All skill levels thrown together for a friendly game, where my pylon work was appreciated, even when held up to the some of the former junior A calibre players. It became what I most looked forward to all year. I played with a number of doctors, which was fluke but a happy one, considering the chances of cardiac arrest from the weekend warriors. We enjoyed it so much that I started up a summer version doing ball hockey...not nearly as fun and way more work (can't glide on the cement) but again, simpler times in relived glory.
A bit of reflection today, it would seem. A yearning for the simpler times in life I guess...when you had to worry about making it home before a loose curfew, you drank out of garden hoses and the outdoors was the only place you wanted to be.
Ciao
D
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