river rat: Drop the Puck Nearly every other year the weather gets cold enough to freeze the river solid. I say every other year just because, as a kid, I prayed for it to clog up every single year with craggy ice berg sheets and freeze solidly to the muddy bottom just for me. I wanted it to happen. I prayed for a way to walk on water.
At first it was quite literally a prayer. Every night when our mother would shoo us off to bed and remind us to say our prayers I'd be preparing my pleas for colder weather. When I think of it now those innocent prayers make me shudder.
The cold air knifes through me no matter how many layers I have on. My Yankee blood has thinned inexplicably to dishwater and, despite a considerably thicker layer of blubber than I carried as a boy, my fat ass shivers and shakes as soon as it gets down to freezing. The thought of prayer crossing over my chattering teeth aimed at promoting continued cold has become foreign to me.
Kids though, they have some metabolism. Young boys especially have got some inner furnace that allows snot icicles to dangle from their noses and for their fingernails to turn deep purple from near frostbite before they'll admit to being cold.
As a teen I got into life guarding and all the glory that accompanied that school age profession. In the early spring I would teach swimming lessons to wee kids-first timers-who would turn positively blue and throw fits if they were made to leave the pool.
I guess I was one of those little blue lipped, teeth chattering, and wildly outdoorsy buggers also, because I sure prayed for cold weather a lot.
"Now I lay me down to sleep, for I pray my soul to keep..." and here's the scary part, "and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. And please, please, please God; freeze up the river so I can learn how to ice skate better. A-men."
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My older brothers and sisters skated. They learned from Dad and, I suppose from Mom. By the time I came along, Mom's legs had given out from carrying eight babies to term-each of them getting progressively larger at birth topping out with me, the last.
Dad tells of days when he and Mom skated together as a couple. Funny as it may sound I am glad I didn't see them on the ice together. Reality could never live up to my imagination.
Inside the shaken up snow globe of my mind I see Dad with his crazy as can be, kinky hair-do in a pomade free pompadour and Mom, sweet Mom with her athletic, ample figure and million dollar, teenage, Tina Turner legs, skating casually in graceful arcs on glass-smooth ice. Their skates draw Spiro graph exact lines nested within each other, perfectly drawn with unwavering thighs and rock solid ankles. The lanky, sinewy young father would pick his girl up and twirl her effortlessly, returning her to the glassy ice...thus ending their freestyle program with a sweet and solemn kiss. Tens from all the judges.
Surely they were no Dick Button and Sonya Henny-nor were they Brian Boitano and Oksana Bayul.
No, reality would have trouble skating with those fantasies.
As a young skater I had typical collapsed ankles and pained arches. At first, it didn't look good for me and skating. If all the other novices my age were doing any better I may have given up. But together, we gradually toughened up our ankles and the pain in our arches subsided as all the growing bones and connective tissues of our feet grew accustomed to standing on a cold, steel rail for hours at a time. We still had a long way to go to make it to the pros.
Professional skaters are tough and disciplined athletes. It may be one of the most grueling sports going. Watch a pro hockey game and then go rent yourself some skates and try to duplicate the sixty seconds or more that those guys put out at 100%. Or, maybe ice dancing is your bag. Try it for a two minute program. Then ask your ass muscles if they ever want to carry you to a skating rink again. Ever.
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After the first season skating I prayed nightly for ice and cold. That first year the river came close to freezing solid. At one point it clogged full of ice and stopped up, but a warm snap and rain storm washed it all away except for the icy ruffle around the shoreline. More prayer was needed. Either that or I wasn't praying right.
"God, I need to skate. Thank you for all the gifts, and all, but could I trade out a few birthdays' and Christmas' worth of gifts for a few more cold nights?" Blatant cold weather lobbying at the bedside, bartering with Jesus. Oh, and, "amen".
We didn't have any ice skating rinks nearby and were so pre-occupied with other seasonal sports that I completely forgot about ice and skating until Christmas time each year. There were some nice ponds but they weren't within walking distance, requiring us little kids to get rides from parents that weren't as keen on the cold as we were.
The following winter the river clogged up again and almost froze solid, but didn't quite make it. It did get cold enough though, to freeze Big Creek at the south end of town where Uncle Ken's Amoco sat.
Big Creek had a large enough eddy at its mouth to form up a decent sized junior ice hockey rink. We all carried shovels, sticks, skates and our overstuffed winter outfits made up of layers and layers of wool sweaters and insulated long johns. I had an edge on the cold with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ken right there to thaw me out and feed me mid day. Still, there was work to be done.
Everybody shoveled like mad to clear any snow off the rink every day. Eventually, our shoveling created walls, often up to four feet tall, defining the rink and simulating the boards where our hero ice hockey players slammed and checked each other viciously.
Ten boys with shovels running systematically up and down a natural skating rink might not have done as clean a job, but were every bit as entertaining as the zamboni driver. Arguments over direction of snow pushing, whether or not we should flood the rink every night, fires on the ice or beside the ice-it all was fiercely debated daily until the someone dropped the puck on the ice and all hell broke loose.
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Boys who were bookworms nine months out of the year transformed themselves into bloodthirsty, adroit hockey players needful of blood or an assist or a goal or all three. Bigger, slower boys who didn't pay attention to basic skating technique and who had no stick skills found themselves bruised and battered-some of them with loose or missing teeth-while the quicker, better skilled boys skated all day long, scoring and checking in the winter sun.
I enjoyed the hockey. I was one of the bigger boys with the blessing of good genetics that kept me balanced and mindful of where my feet were at all times. I understood the concepts of generous play where an assist meant as much as scoring a goal. But the true fun for me was listening to the banter and trash talk the other boys seemed to have perfected as early as the age of nine.
The cruelty aside, boys in a competitive environment develop early life skills that have been perpetuated in business situations over the centuries. Right or wrong, the quick putdowns and character assassinations of youth translate later on into job performance reviews with water cooler analysis.
"Please Lord, I have forgone several years of birthday wishes and Christmas wishes. I have not picked my nose for the last year and have not said hateful words about Mr. Zimmerman, the Hitler look-alike down the street for at least a month...please freeze the river so I can skate on it, amen."
I needed a score. It had been longer than I could remember since the river had frozen solid. Vague memories of holding my mother and fathers' hands on the way out to the old cabin over frozen water on the river were all I had left of a solidified waterway. I was tired of hearing all the stories about skating on the channels of the river islands and hockey on the main channel in front of town.
The prayers worked. My Christian devotion paid off. My piety and respect for prayer delivered to me cold temperatures sufficient to allow Christ-like water walking in a K-mart purchased, simulated Gore Tex, goose down-like snow suit. Amen.
Slowly. Oh so slowly, the river stopped up and began to freeze all the way down to the muddy bottom near shore. After ten days of single digit temperatures kids and parents began meekly, tentatively walking out on the solid river surface.
The stretch of growing grass patch and scrubby island in front of town created a slow moving channel fifty meters wide by two hundred meters long. During summer the channel was useful for not much more than a calm way to start paddling out to the islands. Its depth was less than half a meter at best and harbored next to zero fish.
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But in the winter it was the first area to freeze and most likely to freeze solid enough for hockey and skating parties.
At one point I remember three hockey rinks set up right there in sight of the hardware store across the highway. One rink had the older boys playing in full gear-padded pants, hockey skates, helmets and gloves-the other two rinks had the little kids playing and families figure skating.
That slash-slash-slash of skates cutting smooth ice and the scuffling crack of sticks and puck punctuated by adolescent calls for a pass or a slap shot rings through my ears whenever I lace up skates nowadays.
The answer to my prayers for cold weather came on with a vengeance that year. I was ten and had just saved my pennies to buy a proper hockey stick along with my brother. We wore figure skates because that's what was handed down from the older brothers who had moved on. It wasn't until I was in college that I could afford to buy some hockey skates of my own.
I remember my dad telling us how he had made his own hockey stick out of a tree limb he'd been eyeing up for years. He had less money than we had so his ingenuity and tenacity had to help him get by or there just wouldn't have been any play on the ice for him. He told us how that stick lasted him for two years playing as roughly as anything he'd seen anywhere but the pros.
My first stick was made of ashe. It had two layers of fiberglass on both sides and a double layer of duct tape that I'd carefully wrapped around the blade. It broke in a week.
Play all day long on the ice left several of us with frostbitten hands and toes. That first year that I played on the channel was so cold that no one worried about falling into the water. There was no water. It was frozen into the mud everywhere except for a narrow rivulet of water three meters wide in the middle of the channel, far from dangerous even for the cars and trucks that some idiots were parking out on the ice. The water flow was barely visible through the thick ice. Ice that was sound enough for those cars and trucks to park side by side, heavy laden with drunken hockey fans.
When we got so cold we couldn't continue play, or when someone got a tooth loosened or a nose broken, a break in the action meant thawing out. Fires were made the priority of boys who couldn't keep up or those who didn't get picked for the teams that were burning up the ice. Panting and red-faced boys stripped down to long john shirts with bulky, padded pants and padded gloves soaked clear through needed to sit steaming by fires made from driftwood culled in a chilled panic to warm up.
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Night time fires were environmental disasters back then. I remember skating parties where a few tires were lit to start the snow and ice glazed lumber and driftwood that was hastily grabbed at the last minute. I've seen tires melted a foot into the ice, their steel belts rusting prematurely from the heat and sudden introduction of water after the rubber had boiled and sputtered away, releasing heat and noxious smoke into the air. I came to judge the severity of the previous winter by the number of tire carcasses visible from a john boat while poling up the channel in the spring.
Fifty or more sets of steel belted remains meant that God had truly listened to my needs and that I was not likely to get that Rock-em Sock-em Robot set that I just knew I needed.
Each year through high school I prayed and bartered with God for dramatically cold weather. I gave up wishes for clothing, watches, games, and even a new baseball glove.
I prayed for cold weather so I could make a few more dollars shoveling snow at the church.
I prayed for cold weather so I could ride my Mickey Mouse sled down Democrat Hill a mile and a half to the river.
Above all I prayed that the cold weather would freeze the Susquehanna River solid. Solid so the drop of the puck and the slash of steel replaced, even if for a few months, bull frogs and airboats for a few purple lipped kids to dream of pro hockey stardom by a black tire fire.