Читать книгу Let It Snow - Darryl Humber - Страница 8

INTRODUCTION

The following story might be apocryphal, but one hopes it is true.

Joseph E. Atkinson began his career as a journalist and rose to become publisher of the Toronto Star, from which he developed a reputation as a reformer and defender of the less fortunate. Born near Newcastle, Ontario, in 1865, he died in 1948, but the charitable foundation bearing his name continues to do good work over sixty years later.

It does so perhaps because of an incident Atkinson recalled from his boyhood days in Newcastle. He was, by his own description, a small and fragile lad with a speech impediment lasting into his twenties.

“I was sitting at the edge of the village pond, watching the skating. My brothers and sisters and my playmates were having a furious time. It didn’t occur to me to ask for or even expect skates. In families such as ours not everybody could have a pair. You had to wait for an older brother to outgrow his and pass them on to you.

“I noticed a lady standing off to the side. She asked me why I wasn’t skating with the others. I told her, without any sense of envy, that I had no skates. It was one of the natural things about life.

“She took my hand and asked me to come with her. We went into a village store and to my astonishment she bought me a pair of skates.

“‘To keep?’ I asked her.

‘Of course,’ she said.

“I went back to the pond in a daze of glory. I never forgot it. And as for the lady, I never saw her again.”

Winter is Canada’s splendid season and it inspires acts of generosity, from cleaning a neighbour’s sidewalk to commiserating with colleagues on a hard day’s journey into work. In Bowmanville, very near Atkinson’s childhood home in Newcastle, it’s the act of Al and Anna Strike building an ice rink on their front lawn for local children to use even though their own grew up and left home years ago. It’s a tradition approaching its fiftieth year and this book is at least partly a celebration of dedication such as theirs.

There’s a lot of ill-informed commentary about our shared experience of snow and cold somehow making us a hardier, more resilient, and tougher people. It just may be an opposite impact, however, that makes winter so prominent in our history and attitude toward others.

Weather, in this case winter, humbles us with its power and its indifference to our fate. We tamper with it at our peril.

Sports are the means Canadians use to fight back against the harsh reality of the season that informs so many metaphors of decline and death. In sports we triumph or find honour in participation.

From the days Canadians discovered in snowshoeing a sporting element and surrounded it with group songs and mixed hikes, to the steely resolve of curlers on mid-winter outdoor rinks, fortified by their whisky and haggis, and finally to the present day in which youngsters and their parents wake early in the cold and dark for 5:00 a.m. hockey practices, sports isn’t just the way we survive winter, it’s the way we revel in its opportunities.

Climate change may erode this happy relationship and so it is incumbent on Canadians to lead the way, at first, in reversing this trend and then by restoring the glory of winter. It is a cause for national interest and engagement! Hopefully our words will do their part.

Darryl Humber

William Humber