Hockey Night in Canada

There is not too much hockey down here in the south. There is one team, the Mississippi Riverkings from the Central Hockey League. Other then that, the only other professional team around here is the Nashville Predators of the NHL After that, the only other ice around here generally comes in a bag. This brought my thoughts back to the prairies where hockey was not only a sport, but really a religion. As football is fanatical in the States, hockey is a rite of passage in Canada.

The town that I lived in was small, so small that there wasn't even a restaurant or a bar, but it did have a skating rink. No - not a covered ice surface. An outdoor rink. Why would it be easy in the 60's? The ice was flooded at the beginning of the winter when the temperatures dictated that it would not melt away. My Dad was usually the one who set up the community ice rink with long hoses that pumped water from the town's dugout. A dugout was a large hole in the ground that accumulated water. Water that was used to flood the rink. Old boards surrounded the rink to keep the pucks in. More important is the fact that it snowed a lot and snow covered the ice in large amounts, so kids could not play until the ice was scraped. We had our hockey sticks and our skates but we always dragged a snow shoved behind us when we went because you never knew if the ice was going to be clean or not. It was easy to learn how to skate because you had a snow shovel to keep your balance. You learned how to skate and angle your shovel so that you could clear the ice like a snowplow.

There was a building beside it that was used to put on skates. It was simply called "the shack". A very old building that we shared with mice and an old oil stove. The chances that the shack had heat going when you went there was about as good as winning the weekly lottery. Typically it needed to be lit, or cleaned or something but most times we put our cold feet into cold skates and headed to the ice. No one liked it I suppose, but we really did not know anything different. Even Gretzky had it better then we did, his Dad had a backyard rink for him when he started.

We scraped and skated for hours as we shot pucks. balls and whatever else we had at the time. Many a time we over shot the boards and had to go looking in huge piles of snow from the ice to find the elusive puck. Sometimes we were lucky and sometimes not. When Spring came we were the first there to find all the wayward pucks from the winter so that we had a fresh stash for the next year.

Without trying to sound old, we made our own fun. We had lots of exercise and used what we had to create a world of culture that we believed in, even at that early age.