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ОглавлениеONE Wishing Winter was Nine Months Long: Winter in Canada’s Story
Ah, for the days when winter arrived in November and lasted well into April, when snow piled up to the second floor of one’s house, and summer was, as they say, two months of bad skating. Or are these just memories we tell each other as we age? Sometimes it seems as if we live in the dream of a world that existed only in our imaginations, like a Canadian version of the “Songlines” guiding the pathways of Australia’s original inhabitants.
If you live in western Canada, one such dream might consist of skating on an icy slough, that marshy, or reedy pool, pond, inlet, or backwater near a creek off which youngsters and their parents would shovel snow, perhaps by hand. Hot water drawn from a steam engine used to crush grain during the day might be drained into a few barrels, then placed on a sled and brought down to the creek and dumped onto the ice to help level the surface.
This was no “slough of despair” as described in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that ironically might have sat in the limited library of those Bible-believing skaters. It was a special place in which skates were clamped on one’s leather shoes, eventually tearing off the soles. Hockey sticks were fashioned from crooked willow branches and a puck could be anything from a block of wood to a frozen cow pie.
In eastern Canada the dream of winter was more often of the pleasures found in natural rinks built in schoolyards or in one’s backyard. Long into the nights youngsters would glide over the glassy surface, drawn home only by the call for dinner.
In Ontario your treasure was most likely a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. In Quebec youngsters donned the bright “rouge, blanc et blue” of Les Canadiens, unless, like the unfortunate child in Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” (“Le chandail de hockey”), the T. Eaton Company mistakenly sent the young Quebecker one emblazoned with “une abominable feuille d’érable” or “an abominable maple leaf,” in which case your mother made you wear it so as not to disappoint Mr. Eaton.
If there is such a thing as a series of small straws that eventually broke the back of national unity, Carrier’s fictional character had more than his load, though on a deeper level the story speaks to the profound shared experience of all Canadians, regardless of whether their first language is French of English. Saturday nights in winter were the purest demonstrations of this realm.
If you lived in English Canada, it was a magical time for listening to Foster Hewitt’s radio call of the Leafs game. He inspired young and old to imagine their own lives as great stars or at the very least as persons who might one day be lucky enough to spend just one evening in the hallowed Maple Leaf Gardens. It was the closest thing to a public shrine in Canada, that is unless you lived in Quebec, where the Montreal Forum played a similarly haunting role.
Young women might vicariously share in these moments, but for them the exploits of Barbara Ann Scott, women’s figure-skating gold medalist in the 1948 Winter Olympics, inspired their own twirls and spins on ice, even as they asked Santa Claus to please leave under their family tree a doll fashioned in the likeness of the great skater who had won her first national junior title as an eleven-year-old.
Winter has shaped Canada’s image and been embraced with hearty enthusiasm from snowshoeing hikers in the nineteenth century to future hockey stars on homemade rinks and to the indoor spectacle of figure-skating carnivals and curling bonspiels.
A Barrie women’s hockey team in 1897. Back row: Louise King, Mabel Lowe, Mrs. Ben Smith, Lucie Payne, Flo Brigham, May Graham; front row: Annie Graham, Amy Lowe, Ethel Urquhart.
Our literature, our songs, and our memories of youth all have their connection to winter’s refreshing tonic. Even as we curse ice-laden roads on the morning commute to work or watch with keen anticipation the Weather Channel’s daily prediction for our weekend ski trip, Canadians sense that somehow this bracing time of year is central to their very survival.
In Montreal, snowshoers of the nineteenth century sang their wish that winter could be nine months long, but alas, twenty-first-century winter’s diminishment to a weak reminder of its former glory is a real possibility as climate change wreaks long-term havoc. Winter means something for the sense of Canadian identity, and for the collective memory of the country’s heritage, nor should we forget those businesses and industries dependent on the “splendid season.”
It’s quite possible, however, that Vancouver’s hosting of the 2010 Winter Olympics will mark the last time the Games will ever be held in Canada. Assuming Canada is called upon in twenty to twenty-four years from now (the period between the Games in Calgary in 1988 and those in 2010 was twenty-two years because the Games began a new four-year cycle in 1994, two years after those in 1992, in order that they not be held the same year as the Summer Games), winter may be a fading memory, or the cost of moving all events indoors may make them financially prohibitive. We can’t forget that hockey, figure skating, and speed skating were all once played on outdoor surfaces.
It isn’t that one can’t build an indoor facility for ski jumping or any number of outdoor sports. The better question is why one would want to other than as a fading memory of a once noble time of year?
In these pages we embark upon a voyage of both remembrance and caution. Looking back at the conditions that instilled feverish excitement at the first glimpse of a snowflake in the darkening days of late fall, and forward to the unusual world of melting ice caps, unpredictable weather, and assaults on Canada’s backyard ice rink culture.
Winter plays a major role in the Canadian story, not only in how it has shaped our sports history, but, more directly, our experience of everyday life. Nor is climate change only to blame for changes in its role. Increasing urbanization and higher expectations of comfort have also played their part in lessening winter’s place in our lives.
What did our great grandparents and their predecessors think of winter’s distinct conditions? No doubt they griped, but evidence seems to suggest they also welcomed its peculiar opportunities.
Fred Grant’s memories from this era, preserved in the Simcoe County Archives outside Barrie, Ontario, provide some clues. Writing in the early 1920s, many years after he had left for the Pacific Coast to play professional lacrosse in Victoria in early 1892, he recalled the winter sports and recreation of his youth in Barrie and its surroundings in the 1870s and 1880s. He also had many things to say about how games like hockey have morphed into something different in the twentieth century.
A Barrie women’s hockey team in the early twentieth century. Back row: Bertha Holmes, Del Spry, Georgie Maconchy; front row: Zilla Stevenson, Olive McCarthy, Jessie Oliver, Bessie Stevenson.
He will be an occasional companion as we undertake this journey.
A small community of a few thousand people, approximately one hundred kilometres north of downtown Toronto, Barrie in the late nineteenth century was the gateway to the emerging cottage and summer recreation country north of it, and the main centre for a largely rural hinterland.
Fred Grant’s memories of his youth reflected Barrie’s countryside location and its position on the shores of Kempenfelt Bay, off Lake Simcoe. It was here he witnessed an unusual sport characteristic of the day:
Horse racing on the ice on Barrie’s bay used to be a very popular sport, and was held during a whole week each winter. A mile track, sixty feet or more wide was cleared with a huge snow scraper, and the resulting races provided most interesting sport for the very large crowds of spectators and horsemen from all over the province, as well as the local followers of the sport.
And of course these latter included the curious small boy who always found something interesting in anything new. Sometimes after a ridge of snow three or four feet high on either side of the track had been piled up by the scraper, a thaw and frost would follow, and open-air skating would be carried on, while these races were being run, which added to the enjoyment.
The names of the horses are not so easily remembered, but the popular favourite always was a little black horse that stood straight up on its hind feet and looked as if it would topple over on the driver each time it turned before starting — I think it was named Black Diamond, and it certainly could travel too though it was only half the size of the other racers.
Sledding in Manitoba, 1886.
One might ask if a time can be pinpointed when this winter experience of outdoor frivolity and lively socialization disappeared from the everyday, generally positive experience of Canadians and became simply a nuisance to overcome and an aggravation to endure? Or, despite our grumbling, do we not secretly relish the season as one distinctly our own, particularly in the ways we respond to its challenges and revel in its possibilities?
Canadians of the nineteenth century not only watched horse races on ice, but curled on outdoor ponds, and played their first hockey games on natural surfaces subject to fluctuating temperatures. By all accounts citizens of the day accepted such experiences as normal and, in their own way, part of the charm of living in a northern climate. Work was something to which they generally did not commute, particularly if they lived in the countryside. The greatest hazard may have been removing snow from overloaded roofs, getting lost on roads covered in drifting snow, or falling afoul of the era’s restrictive social codes.
Recalling those days when young women and men occasionally tested limits to their freedom, Grant said:
Of all those winter pastimes of boyhood days in Barrie, probably the one with the greatest appeal to those now many years absent from the old town were the skating parties on the bay, especially when the arrival of a clear expanse of ice and a bright moonlit night happened at the same time.
There were many times when the surface of the entire lake was frozen over, and a skate to Big Bay Point and even to Orillia was enjoyed. On one occasion, however, I had the pleasure of being one of a crowd of half-a-dozen couples who, one moonlit night, skated from in front of Barrie station down past Big Bay Point, across a corner of Lake Simcoe to the mouth of the Holland River and up the river to the railroad bridge, half a mile or so south of the Bradford station, and returning on the midnight train, which at that time was the transcontinental one.
It would never do at this late date to mention the girls’ names, as some of them are grandmothers now, and besides, we had no chaperone on the trip.
From such a daily engagement with winter on a daily basis, conditions began to change significantly for Canadians in the last part of that century. The growth of large-scale industry and manufacturing in urban centres occurred alongside the associated termination of smaller operations in rural towns. Fixed-link transportation afforded by trains contributed to the centralization of many cultural and sporting activities once distributed over a wider geographic region, while waterfront industries powered by steam power, made big city living an economic powerhouse in which people with higher incomes could purchase consumer goods unimaginable a generation before. The daily press, the department store, theatres, and commercial sports made the city a destination for increasing numbers of rural dwellers.
By the early twentieth century, a further transition was occurring. The private automobile and alternating-current electricity made suburbanization possible as well as the gradual redistribution of industrial production from its downtown locations. All this did, however, was make the city bigger. Its rural counterparts, and their associated memories, grew weaker. There would be no going back to a supposedly “simpler” age.
Meanwhile, in the countryside by the 1880s, improvements in agricultural mechanization and competition from the wheat fields of the West resulted in an almost fifty-year period of rural depopulation, as many in eastern Canada flocked west to take advantage of the virgin farmlands of the prairies.
Fred Grant was one of those, but for him this was a new territory of winter pleasures to explore:
In December 1898, I had the pleasure of being a member of a bunch of hockey players in Golden, B.C., who journeyed to Banff, Alberta, to meet the team of that place in a game on the Bow River, and among the entertainers were four former Barrieites — Mr. and Mrs. “Bob” Campbell, the former the principal of the public school there, a player on the Banff team, now a resident of Calgary and a member of the Alberta Legislature, and a very pronounced opponent of the party led by his fellow townsman Premier Stewart; Tom Wilson, the owner of a large outfitting business for tourist and mountaineering parties, frequently a guide to Dominion Government Geological parties, and probably the best-informed man in Canada on the famous Lake Louise and Yoho Valley Districts; and Billy Alexander, then and now in the jewellery business.
Thomas Jebb, a local enthusiast in Orillia at the start of the twentieth century, enjoys the winter weather.
A whole story could be written about this wonderful national park [Banff] and its many novel attractions from its spray falls and truly wonderful “Cave and “Basin,” [Historic Site] where swimming in the open air takes place amid a forty-below-zero temperature and high piles of snow up to the very edge of the pool in which the overflow water from the ever-bubbling warm sulphur springs of “The Cave” makes things comfortable so long as you keep immersed, up to the magnificent CPR Banff Springs Hotel, which seems to be suspended up among the clouds when viewed from the “Valley of the Bow.”
Among the many entertaining features provided for the visitor was a sleigh ride through the park, past a big herd of buffalo running loose pretty much as they did in the wild state, and browsing on buds of the young trees and bushes, and many a scurrying coyote who hiked for cover upon approach of humans.
Urbanization by itself was no reason for winter to have a declining role in the daily lives of Canadians, but perhaps in retrospect it was inevitable, at least during the first formative decades of the twentieth century. City homes with central heating were, for all their primitive protection, far more comfortable than country places in which wood-burning heat might only be provided to a few rooms and turned off completely at night.
Quickly lost from memory were the ways in which winter in the country had been a respite from at least some outdoor chores for both adults and children. In the absence of the world of modern media, a young child in particular anticipated the coming winter season as a world exemplified by perfect natural ice on an open pond, or at least according to Fred Grant:
When the ice was first formed on the ponds or bay, of course it was always some venturesome small boy who was first out. It was impossible to control him when the whole bay was open to him, but when only a small surface was available the town constable — Tom Blain or Jim Marrin or Jimmy Carson — was very conservative about allowing anyone on until it was perfectly safe, though they might be assured, “That ice is strong enough to hold a herd of elephants. When are you going to let us on?”
If everyone would content himself or herself with decorous straight-away skating everything would be satisfactory, but it would require the Arctic Ocean to give safe room for the scooting kids in a game of tag, and a bunch of girls doing a combined figure eight, while some fellow cut a swath the whole width of the pond with his outside edge, or spread-eagle, scissors or smoothing iron; and did you ever see a couple doing the double grapevine who turned out of their course for anyone?
But the most disastrous skating menace was the scorcher with humped shoulders who raced ahead until he met some struggling couple or an earnest exponent of some of the above stunts when there would be a heap of ruins.
Winter, however, was only a minor hindrance to daily employment in the industrial city. Work was no longer necessarily in one’s own neighbourhood and usually required travelling on crowded streetcars, or, if one was more fortunate, a poorly insulated private car. City streets required one’s personal labour to be cleared of snow, while icy hazards had to be avoided by wary pedestrians, such as broken bones from falls. Winter, in short, was increasingly a nuisance and not something to be embraced. Indeed for these early city “pioneers” there was likely less engagement in winter sports then for later generations of city dwellers.
This photo of John Campbell of Parry Sound, circa 1895, recalls an era when winter was king.
Part of this was due to “blue laws” emerging from the Sabbatarian movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. They restricted Sunday activities in many cities so that by 1912 tobogganing was banned in places like Toronto’s High Park on the one day that most people might have the leisure time to enjoy it.
Urban poverty, long working hours, and then two wars and a depression ensured that a return to the glory of winter activity similar to that of the countryside past would have to await more affluent lifestyles of the post–Second World War period.
If anything, city dwellers relied on watching others take part in activities they had once participated in themselves. Professional hockey as a modern commercial entertainment played in indoor hockey palaces was perfectly suited to the needs of these city residents. Cities like Montreal and Toronto differentiated themselves from neighbouring pretenders like Ottawa and Hamilton by building increasingly larger arenas, culminating, in the case of Toronto, in the opening of Maple Leaf Gardens in 1931.
So while in bigger cities like Toronto or Montreal, and particularly the newer ones of Calgary and Edmonton, the countryside remained almost within a reasonable walking distance away, it was a place increasingly removed from most city dwellers’ daily experience.
Alongside this, the expectation of convenience associated with life in the city suggested to many that even a semblance of discomfort, such as that associated with outdoor winter activity, was something to be abandoned as a remnant of the past.
In Toronto, there would be one last winter to remember the season’s pleasures and its challenges before war and urbanization’s other demands consigned to memory this older, almost naive pleasure of the season. It occurred even as the seeds were being planted for winter’s eventual transition to its modern form as a commodity whose pleasure would increasingly be purchased either in the form of hockey equipment from CCM and Eaton’s, or weekend skiing getaways, at first to little hills north of the city, but gradually to more remote and expensive resorts.
A hockey club from Elmvale, Ontario, undated.
For CCM, or the Canada Cycle and Motor Company, winter was its corporate salvation.
Formed in the late nineteenth century as a conglomerate of smaller bicycle-making companies to compete with big American importers, the bottom had almost immediately dropped out of the cycling market. Cleverly, its Canadian managers opted for a year-round strategy of producing and selling bikes and accessories in the summer and skates and hockey equipment in the winter.
The irony in CCM’s case was that as bankruptcy overtook the company by the 1970s, its most valuable commodity was its logo and brand name, which survives today on hockey sweaters and helmets, and no doubt mystifies users as to its origin.
To our contemporary senses the long-ago winter of 1912 was as miserable as could be — so cold that by the end of February, Lake Ontario had frozen over and citizens wandered kilometres out into the lake to catch a glimpse of Rochester. Temperatures fell below -10°C on 56 days, while snowfall at 1.43 metres was nearly double the normal.
Trees and ice on the lake exploded in the cold with a sound like gunfire, the airbrakes of streetcars froze, and natural gas lines were clogged in a solid mass that had to be continually pumped. One simply bundled up against its worst sting and school went on despite the need to wear one’s outdoor clothing in rooms often no more than 18°C.
But the ice sailing in Toronto harbour was brilliant, and the early challenges of artificial ice were forgotten for at least one winter.
If he hadn’t moved west by this time Fred Grant might have joined the festivities, as he recalled his own youth in Barrie:
There used to be some pretty fine sport, too, in ice-boating on the bay, in which Levi Carley and Ike Boon were the most prominent and had the fastest and largest boats. It was fun enough when you were out skating to jump on and have a ride, but far better to hang onto the frame and slide on your skates, and when it came to the boat making a sharp turn, why “crack-the-whip” wasn’t in it with the flip you’d get, and it was entirely your own affair whether you slid away on your skates or on the back of your neck.
Of course, you remember the old slide you had sprinkled and then polished up until it was just about the slipperiest spot in town — and usually right in the path of the greatest pedestrian traffic (and if it had a slant, so much the better, as it was easier to keep going once you got started) and then some old curmudgeon would come along with a can of ashes and spoil the whole shooting-match, with the curt admonition, “What’s the matter with you kids; do you want to break your bloomin’ necks?” And who never paid any attention to your very pertinent rejoinder, “We wasn’t hurtin’ anything; guess they are our own necks, ain’t they?”
Some activities like ice boating eventually did disappear while others like tobogganing became the property only of children. The hardships of the winter of 1912 were quickly forgotten as people got on with life in the big cities of the land.
In a few short years young men would be off to a war from which many would never return, and for survivors those lost years were in many cases made up by finally turning their backs on that residue of memory of seasonal discomfort that their parents, grandparents, and themselves as children had once embraced.
Fred Grant recalled what had been lost:
Those old sleighing parties provided many an evening’s happy enjoyment. Their objective was usually out into the country to some farmer’s home, where part of the evening would be spent in a social dance, or “parlour games” in the case of younger people making up the party, and to “thawing out” before taking the couple of hours return trip.
West Street Rink in Orillia during the 1880s.
The box of the commodious old sleigh had been filled a foot or so deep with straw, and robes and blankets galore provided when the weather was really cold and the driving snow bit into a fellow’s cheeks. But in the sleigh days and nights no one was afraid of blizzards. Having got out into the country, many times the roads were found impassable through the drifts and a shortcut would be taken through the fields, and lots of times was the snowfall so heavy that it covered up the rail fences, and when it didn’t as many of the top rails as necessary would be removed to allow a passage.
Later on we were old enough to pilot a single rig ourselves. They talk now of a motor spark plug, meaning a second-hand “tin lizzie” probably, but ask any of the old boys and they’ll tell you they had nothing on an old-fashioned horse and cutter outfit you could hire for two dollars for a whole afternoon or evening at Alex Fraser’s Livery.
Two wars and a depression didn’t kill the experience of winter, but did consign it to a place of less prominence in daily lives. It would take the return of a somewhat more stable peace after 1945, and the increasing affluence of this post–Second World War period to finally restart the great engine of winter sports.
At first it was youngsters playing hockey in an expanding network of minor hockey in the 1950s. However, it was an enthusiasm generally available only for boys, although one young girl named Abby Hoffman did make an improvised appearance on one of those gender-limiting teams before her eventual discovery.
There was the steady growth of a winter-sports industry for skiers and curlers in an expanding network of clubs and resorts. Once formerly limited to only the very wealthy, these sports now attracted a more egalitarian membership.
Adventurous baby boomers who came of age as teenagers in the 1960s discovered there was more to life than their stereotyped existence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll by popularizing entirely new recreations like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Less frantic members of this age group opted for cross-country skiing, which enjoyed an extraordinary boom in the 1970s.
Within a few years a society that had only recently rejected the playing wishes of young girls like Abby Hoffman had been completely transformed. By the 1990s organized women’s hockey was flourishing.
For those who thought they had left that part of their lives behind, senior men’s hockey challenged the already overstretched schedules of local hockey rinks. When some of their fellow players succumbed to heart attacks on ice, their friends rationalized that at least they died doing something they liked, and then kept right on playing, their own mortality hanging in some cases by the same fragile encounter with full time.
The growth of year-round lifestyle communities in places like Whistler, British Columbia, or Collingwood, Ontario, completed the re-entry of winter into the lives of Canadians, though its residents must have sufficient resources to live there. It is the enjoyment of the lifestyle associated with those places, which ironically is now part of the larger dilemma we face in ensuring the continuance of future winter conditions.
Hockey on frozen slough, east of Viking, Alberta, 1912.
Winter has now become more than a season. It is a window into the future. It is reflected on an almost daily basis in the glaciers and ice fields and snow-packed mountains and backyard rinks and even the permafrost in Arctic wilderness, and the penguins and polar bears that live in the dark and cold places of the world.
Climate change, once the topic of mild concern, and then intense debate, is now acknowledged to be an increasing threat to survival, or at least to our ability to live within reasonably tolerant levels of heat and frost.
How we deal with that challenge will define our place in the world for centuries, and along with that, a world in which winter is commonplace rather than a rare experience. Human willingness to confront this challenge is at least partly based on our ability to look back at what once so enflamed passions and created a distinct national identity.
It is easy to forget the glories of what once was, and instead take for granted as both inevitable and normal, our experience of the world today and into the future.
Winter, the “splendid season,” is more than just a time of year. It is the metaphor of who and what Canadians have been, are, and imagine themselves to be. Winning gold medals or owning the podium at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver would only be a shallow victory if Canadians accepted winter’s decline as a fact of life beyond their control.
