Clutch Munny
12-29-2005, 04:30 PM
I have to this day a vivid tactile memory of the cold window against my face. Every week night of the winter – and north of North Battleford, this meant five months of the year – my brother and I would press our faces against the glass, jockeying for the proper angle to gauge whether The Lights were on at the rink.
The Lights were supposed to come on at seven, but might come on a few minutes early. Snowsuits, mitts and tuques on, then, we would wait to see if an extra game or lap or goal could be scrounged each night. Nor would we leave the house until we saw The Lights. Seven o’clock is deepest night in winter, and if The Shack wasn’t open yet, if the caretaker, old Horr’ble Orville, had not arrived to light the woodstove, the cold made it impossible to sit outside and tie laces in any case. No, we waited until The Lights came on. And then we raced out of our mobile home and crunched through the hard snow, a three-minute trot down to the rink.
The Shack was a chipboard miracle: tall enough to stand up in, with benches round the walls for ten or twelve, a floor of ancient two-by-tens long since chewed to splinters by innumerable skate blades, and a cheap woodstove in the corner, glowing a sliver of orange through the gap in its round vent. Horr’ble Orville was in fact very far from being horrible, though he was gruff. Each night he would tie up the stiff skate laces of a dozen toddlers whose parents had sent them down to the rink, and would keep the stove fiercely hot. By eight o’clock the thin metal along the sides of the stove would carry a faint suggestion of cherry, and only those of us fresh in from the ice could bear to sit near it. Packed pellets of snow from the pant-legs of jeans, or loose snow brushed off skate blades, would not even stop to melt on the stove’s top; lobbed from across The Shack, they would explode into steam instantly, which would itself vanish quickly into the dry winter air. Sometimes grown men or some of the older boys would come down just to sit in The Shack and swap stories all night, never even putting on their skates. Of course this was the depths of madness -- we’re playing hockey out there! – but the ways of grown-ups are inscrutable, and not very interesting in any case. The action was out on the ice.
From seven to eight o’clock was just skating, because the world contains girls and weirdos and not everyone likes to play hockey. Well, to be fair, there were the very tiny kids. They couldn’t play hockey. The girls, with a few notable exceptions, just owned figure skates – this was the bad old days. So, fine, we spent the first hour just skating.
Just skating was utter bedlam, though, with more body contact and outright danger than hockey at its worst can produce. The simplest game was a version of Tag, which works like this: One person is It at centre ice, and everyone else is crammed together at the end boards. At a signal, everyone skates at warp speed down to other end, trying not to get tagged between the blue lines. But gradually more people become It, until finally only one person is left trying to dodge the tags of twenty people or more. Just to be the last free skater is a great source of pride; but nothing in later life can compare to the feeling of actually getting through that final rush unscathed, jinking, faking, leaping sideways, stomach pulled in to avoid one mittened swipe before sliding under the next. Chased by laughter and scattered profanities, streaming the fog of exertion in the frigid night, a cadre of ten year-olds performed miracles of athleticism unrecognized by any official sport.
When the enthusiasm for Tag gradually frittered away, the rink would see clumps of kids playing Crack the Whip or making race cars. A race car is this: You crouch right down in front of me, facing away from me, grab the top of my skates, and then sit on your hands and my skates with your knees bent and your skate blades on the ice. Then I lean over your head from behind, to prop myself up on your bent knees. Now we’re leaning on each other – there is no happy way to undo this arrangement. We are the car. Finally, our “engine” gets behind me and pushes us forward until we reach an appropriately unsafe speed. You steer, after a fashion, by angling your skates, while I hold us together and our engine tries to predict our collapse and avoid the wreckage. Or, more likely, we search out some more fragile trio and smash them, all the while trying to avoid being smashed by a race car made of Big Kids.
Meanwhile, other kids were Cracking the Whip: Several of us join hands in a line and skate quickly down the ice. When the right speed’s been reached, the anchor at one end of the line suddenly stops and braces himself. As everyone gets yanked to a halt, the whole line pivots around the anchor, with the skaters at the free end whipped faster and faster. Eventually the last skater – sometimes the last three or four – are going so fast they can’t possibly hang onto their neighbour, and last few skaters go hurtling off wildly, usually still holding the handless mitten on which they’d established a death-grip.
When some kids made race cars and others Cracked the Whip, the rink combined all the elements required for delight and bloodshed: some people being whipped about at uncontrollably high velocities, and others moving slowly in heavy, unmaneuverable formations. Collisions were painful, frequent, and eagerly anticipated.
At eight o’clock the little kids went home, most girls went into The Shack, and the boys dragged out the massive hockey nets. Their rough metal pipes had been welded together decades earlier at somebody’s farm, and were hung with old mesh that had been knotted and repaired many times over. The hockey sticks would be plucked out of the massive snowbanks that buttressed the boards from the outside, into which they’d been plunged like arrows in a quiver. Most were old, with floppy frayed black tape hanging from the blades; some were older still, the wooden blades hacked off and replaced with clunky plastic. Then a heavy sponge rubber ball would appear, a shoddy brown thing with most of its red, blue and white covering worn or picked off. A real puck would have required real equipment and designated goalies, while a sponge puck... well, whoever invented the sponge puck had never played or even seen a hockey game.
We had rotating goalie duty and a full participation ethic. If thirty people showed up, then there were thirty people skating, non-stop. Captains emerged from the older boys, teams were picked, and perfection ensued. In the glow of six surplus streetlights on mostly vertical poles arranged around the rink, the young male population of two thousand square kilometres of towns and farmland was distilled into a bouncing whirl of tuque pom-poms that floated above motley hockey jerseys and bandy-legged skating strides.
There were no body-checks, no slashing, no tripping: these things simply did not occur. But with the rutted ice and the surfeit of six year-olds under foot, we were guaranteed a few bloody lips and bashed elbows most nights. Then the injured parties would lurch the few steps to The Shack and rest until the aches lessened and the glasses defogged. The game outside would swing in favour of one team then the other, as this or that player went for a drink or a rest, but the pace never slackened.
My recollections of these rituals are bound up with the uniqueness of every kind of perception at the rink. In the cold, dry night air, and surrounded by the boards, every skittering skate blade or tapping hockey stick sounded as though you’d stretched out on the ice to put your ear next to it. The winter night this far north was dark to the point of an eye-defying brilliance. With no cities and few houses of any sort to lighten the sky, our floodlights etched sharp lines between the outer emptiness beyond the boards, and the dazzling world within them. Tiny iceflakes whirled up from the ice by our skating, invisible during the day, but turning the air itself into a riot of sparkles under the lights. This was our visual wonder; a scrimmaging flight of children entranced by glittering air and a skittering sponge. And utterly blasé to the green and purple auroras that raged in rippling curtains across the northern third of the sky.
I was repeated concussed. Clinton broke his arm. David broke his leg when Brian fell on it. We all froze, a little bit nightly and sometimes seriously. My brothers and I would grit our teeth and moan every night at home, as our numb toes thawed with that deep and alarming pain known only to cold-dwellers. Several times my toes were distinctly blue; once the skin on two of them split lengthwise as they thawed. But every single night for months on end, we knew perfection. At school every day we talked about the rink, and at the rink every evening we became shadows to the winter night: creatures of warm and light, blood and movement, transforming the frozen icy stillness into radiance from seven to nine o’clock. Ten o’clock on Saturdays.
The Lights were supposed to come on at seven, but might come on a few minutes early. Snowsuits, mitts and tuques on, then, we would wait to see if an extra game or lap or goal could be scrounged each night. Nor would we leave the house until we saw The Lights. Seven o’clock is deepest night in winter, and if The Shack wasn’t open yet, if the caretaker, old Horr’ble Orville, had not arrived to light the woodstove, the cold made it impossible to sit outside and tie laces in any case. No, we waited until The Lights came on. And then we raced out of our mobile home and crunched through the hard snow, a three-minute trot down to the rink.
The Shack was a chipboard miracle: tall enough to stand up in, with benches round the walls for ten or twelve, a floor of ancient two-by-tens long since chewed to splinters by innumerable skate blades, and a cheap woodstove in the corner, glowing a sliver of orange through the gap in its round vent. Horr’ble Orville was in fact very far from being horrible, though he was gruff. Each night he would tie up the stiff skate laces of a dozen toddlers whose parents had sent them down to the rink, and would keep the stove fiercely hot. By eight o’clock the thin metal along the sides of the stove would carry a faint suggestion of cherry, and only those of us fresh in from the ice could bear to sit near it. Packed pellets of snow from the pant-legs of jeans, or loose snow brushed off skate blades, would not even stop to melt on the stove’s top; lobbed from across The Shack, they would explode into steam instantly, which would itself vanish quickly into the dry winter air. Sometimes grown men or some of the older boys would come down just to sit in The Shack and swap stories all night, never even putting on their skates. Of course this was the depths of madness -- we’re playing hockey out there! – but the ways of grown-ups are inscrutable, and not very interesting in any case. The action was out on the ice.
From seven to eight o’clock was just skating, because the world contains girls and weirdos and not everyone likes to play hockey. Well, to be fair, there were the very tiny kids. They couldn’t play hockey. The girls, with a few notable exceptions, just owned figure skates – this was the bad old days. So, fine, we spent the first hour just skating.
Just skating was utter bedlam, though, with more body contact and outright danger than hockey at its worst can produce. The simplest game was a version of Tag, which works like this: One person is It at centre ice, and everyone else is crammed together at the end boards. At a signal, everyone skates at warp speed down to other end, trying not to get tagged between the blue lines. But gradually more people become It, until finally only one person is left trying to dodge the tags of twenty people or more. Just to be the last free skater is a great source of pride; but nothing in later life can compare to the feeling of actually getting through that final rush unscathed, jinking, faking, leaping sideways, stomach pulled in to avoid one mittened swipe before sliding under the next. Chased by laughter and scattered profanities, streaming the fog of exertion in the frigid night, a cadre of ten year-olds performed miracles of athleticism unrecognized by any official sport.
When the enthusiasm for Tag gradually frittered away, the rink would see clumps of kids playing Crack the Whip or making race cars. A race car is this: You crouch right down in front of me, facing away from me, grab the top of my skates, and then sit on your hands and my skates with your knees bent and your skate blades on the ice. Then I lean over your head from behind, to prop myself up on your bent knees. Now we’re leaning on each other – there is no happy way to undo this arrangement. We are the car. Finally, our “engine” gets behind me and pushes us forward until we reach an appropriately unsafe speed. You steer, after a fashion, by angling your skates, while I hold us together and our engine tries to predict our collapse and avoid the wreckage. Or, more likely, we search out some more fragile trio and smash them, all the while trying to avoid being smashed by a race car made of Big Kids.
Meanwhile, other kids were Cracking the Whip: Several of us join hands in a line and skate quickly down the ice. When the right speed’s been reached, the anchor at one end of the line suddenly stops and braces himself. As everyone gets yanked to a halt, the whole line pivots around the anchor, with the skaters at the free end whipped faster and faster. Eventually the last skater – sometimes the last three or four – are going so fast they can’t possibly hang onto their neighbour, and last few skaters go hurtling off wildly, usually still holding the handless mitten on which they’d established a death-grip.
When some kids made race cars and others Cracked the Whip, the rink combined all the elements required for delight and bloodshed: some people being whipped about at uncontrollably high velocities, and others moving slowly in heavy, unmaneuverable formations. Collisions were painful, frequent, and eagerly anticipated.
At eight o’clock the little kids went home, most girls went into The Shack, and the boys dragged out the massive hockey nets. Their rough metal pipes had been welded together decades earlier at somebody’s farm, and were hung with old mesh that had been knotted and repaired many times over. The hockey sticks would be plucked out of the massive snowbanks that buttressed the boards from the outside, into which they’d been plunged like arrows in a quiver. Most were old, with floppy frayed black tape hanging from the blades; some were older still, the wooden blades hacked off and replaced with clunky plastic. Then a heavy sponge rubber ball would appear, a shoddy brown thing with most of its red, blue and white covering worn or picked off. A real puck would have required real equipment and designated goalies, while a sponge puck... well, whoever invented the sponge puck had never played or even seen a hockey game.
We had rotating goalie duty and a full participation ethic. If thirty people showed up, then there were thirty people skating, non-stop. Captains emerged from the older boys, teams were picked, and perfection ensued. In the glow of six surplus streetlights on mostly vertical poles arranged around the rink, the young male population of two thousand square kilometres of towns and farmland was distilled into a bouncing whirl of tuque pom-poms that floated above motley hockey jerseys and bandy-legged skating strides.
There were no body-checks, no slashing, no tripping: these things simply did not occur. But with the rutted ice and the surfeit of six year-olds under foot, we were guaranteed a few bloody lips and bashed elbows most nights. Then the injured parties would lurch the few steps to The Shack and rest until the aches lessened and the glasses defogged. The game outside would swing in favour of one team then the other, as this or that player went for a drink or a rest, but the pace never slackened.
My recollections of these rituals are bound up with the uniqueness of every kind of perception at the rink. In the cold, dry night air, and surrounded by the boards, every skittering skate blade or tapping hockey stick sounded as though you’d stretched out on the ice to put your ear next to it. The winter night this far north was dark to the point of an eye-defying brilliance. With no cities and few houses of any sort to lighten the sky, our floodlights etched sharp lines between the outer emptiness beyond the boards, and the dazzling world within them. Tiny iceflakes whirled up from the ice by our skating, invisible during the day, but turning the air itself into a riot of sparkles under the lights. This was our visual wonder; a scrimmaging flight of children entranced by glittering air and a skittering sponge. And utterly blasé to the green and purple auroras that raged in rippling curtains across the northern third of the sky.
I was repeated concussed. Clinton broke his arm. David broke his leg when Brian fell on it. We all froze, a little bit nightly and sometimes seriously. My brothers and I would grit our teeth and moan every night at home, as our numb toes thawed with that deep and alarming pain known only to cold-dwellers. Several times my toes were distinctly blue; once the skin on two of them split lengthwise as they thawed. But every single night for months on end, we knew perfection. At school every day we talked about the rink, and at the rink every evening we became shadows to the winter night: creatures of warm and light, blood and movement, transforming the frozen icy stillness into radiance from seven to nine o’clock. Ten o’clock on Saturdays.