5, 6, Pickup Sticks

Winter, the most depleting of seasons, can arrive any number of ways, some disarmingly pleasant. The most enchanting beginning is with a snowflake, then another, drifting down outside the classroom/ office/kitchen window just about the time the mid-afternoon doldrums are kicking in. As daylight dwindles, the scattered snowflakes become a full-on storm, with drifts forming, cars spinning and skidding, and a rare euphoria in the air.

Those who didn’t catch the morning’s forecast, or who just failed to process it, slide and skate their way home in loafers and pumps, grinning at perfect strangers all the way. Meanwhile, those who left the house prepared march triumphantly through a world gone wild, but one from which they’ll emerge unscathed thanks to their Sorels and parkas. The kids among us — male or female, child or long past — fire off a few snowballs. We know that, contrary to all logic, the first throws of the year will be the most accurate and that we’ll nail, no problem, the stop sign at the corner, the telephone pole across the street, the maple two houses down.

Maybe the snow slacks off by ten or eleven, when it’s time to take the dog out or grab some milk for the morning. Maybe it continues deep into the night, leaving a foot or more of beautiful, blinding whiteness for first light. Either way the world is transformed, softened, and, it seems, warmed up by all the little flakes rubbing against each other as they fell. The grey glum of late autumn is done with, even if all the snow does melt away by the weekend.

That’s the storybook start to winter, and, objectively, a very pleasant way for it to announce its arrival. But for people like me, it’s the absolute worst way winter can begin.

The best way involves cold — lots of it — and cold alone, no snow, coming down like a hammer and not going anywhere, as soon after Halloween as possible. That means ponds and lakes freeze over like sheets of glass, the municipal parks departments begin getting the outdoor rinks in shape, and, sooner rather than later, it becomes possible to enjoy that most sublime of Canadian activities: open-air, pickup hockey.

Hockey in general has become a lame cliché in Canada. The tall foreheads at the cbc feel the country needs some national healing? Commission a unifying special or, better yet, a series. The prime minister’s handlers decide he needs some humanizing? Organize a photo op of him tying up little Chad’s skates. Tim Hortons wants to pitch a new soup-and-sandwich combo? Wal-Mart wants to promote a new line of kids wear made in Burmese sweatshops? The Royal Bank wants to justify the billion or so it made in profit last week? Marketing’s automatic reflex: wheel out a hockey backdrop.

The game in all its guises is invoked, the more sentimentally the better: street hockey with a tennis ball on Happy Valley Crescent; Fred, Ed, Ted, and the boys and their beer league; the future superstar, age two, ankle-skating around the backyard rink.

At the same time, our practical notion of hockey — the money, time, and mental energy we spend on it — increasingly revolves around the game as played in organized leagues, whether by the pros in the nhl or the Atoms of the Kirkland Lake Minor Hockey League: inside an arena, inside cumbersome equipment, most of the players on the bench most of the time, behind which a pacing, anxious coach barks out orders, behind whom one or more idiot fans or parents take it way, way too seriously. The players are said to be playing hockey, but judging by the limited laughter and smiling, there is little play involved. Rather, organized hockey is about following instructions, executing set plays, confronting opponents, scoring, and winning.

Open-air pickup hockey on the other hand, is a game of endless variety, spontaneity, adaptation, and unspoken rituals. With no coaches telling players what to do and no prescribed way to play, it lends itself to an often beautiful creativity. With no referees and few hard-and-fast rules, it insists upon selfregulation and, in so doing, encourages accommodation and tolerance. Pickup hockey is always unpredictable and almost always instructive, even edifying, in a life-lessons kind of way. And as social interaction, it’s unique: virtually no other activity involves strangers gathering in a public place, with no prior organization or commercial exchange, and engaging in a pleasurable pursuit together. Playing.

A typical evening of pickup hockey in Montreal: coming home from work or school, the thought occurs that conditions are ideal. It’s not a case of remembering that it’s Monday and you and your buddies have ice reserved at 11:05 p.m. at a rink in suburban Boisbriand or Brossard. Instead, you simply note that there’s no sign of snow and it’s not so bitterly cold that your toes will get frostbitten. So you go home and change your plans — cancel the movie, convince your girlfriend that there’ll always be another parent-teacher night (and that, yes, she can, actually, record Deadwood for you). Until suppertime, the local rink will be aswarm with the after-school crowd, so you do other chores, perhaps making dinner for the family in order to earn the evening pass. Finally, seven, seven-thirtyish, you slip out and head to the rink, skates on stick, stick over shoulder, puck in pocket.