Читать книгу White Snow Blackout - Joseph A. Byrne - Страница 5

“Canada is having a hard time of it in the early going,” we heard the announcer say through the noise of the crowd there at the Ambassador Auditorium. We watched as the Russians circled back, rifled deadly, accurate, long passes to each other and then gave quick, short, crisp passes to each other. When they went long, we seemed to be short. When they went short, we were long. They circled back and reorganized to attack over and over. Their open ice cycle confused us. We hadn’t used it since the days of the seventh man rover. We had dropped the rover and dropped the open ice cycle. Our players seemed to watch the Russian players, at times, mesmerized by them, just like we were.

“Our players have a better view of the game than we do,” my cousin said at one point. Our guys were watching the Russians play hockey rather than playing hockey against them.

The next winter, after we got our first pair of skates, we thought we were ready to play real hockey. We would walk across the plowed field, a mile or so, in our rubber boots, cross the Puce creek, usually break through the thin ice, melted by warm water run-off from the sewage lagoon further up stream, cross it, climb the now often snow-covered slippery bank of the Puce creek, usually taking several tries at it, before mastering the climb, usually losing a glove or a mitten or a hat and not wanting to go back down to the bottom of the creek to retrieve them. We would then walk the hundred feet or so to the reed-laden pond, on Gabe’s farm where several big guys could be counted on to have a hockey game started. Only we couldn’t tie our skates. We would lace them up, not knowing how to tie a shoe knot. We tried various tricks to keep them from falling off. The one we thought worked best was to wet the laces, let them freeze and tuck the excess inside the boot of our skate.

Then one day, we figured out what to do. Why not tie our skates at home and walk the mile or so across the plowed field to Gabe’s pond.

“Tie our skates for us dad (or mom),” we would say. “Please.”

Either of them would sit us down, pull the laces tight and actually secure them with knots. We were hockey players for sure now. Our skates didn’t even fall off of our feet. We had never heard of sharpening them, but they worked okay anyway, we thought. They worked okay, especially when the ice was soft or if a little layer of slush had formed on it. Our skates actually bit into it then. We had some stability.

“Why don’t they keep the ice that way all of the time?” we would ask ourselves. We didn’t even know there was a way to regulate ice temperature inside buildings. We didn’t even know they tried to keep the ice hard, and smooth, the kind of ice we hated as kids, because we couldn’t skate on it. We just knew it was often cold outside, there on the farm. In those days, it seemed there was always one friend with us. He was always willing to participate with us. His name was Poverty, and he was there on the farm, on Gabe’s pond, there with us, there with our pals, a loyal friend. But it didn’t matter to us. We were hockey players walking out the door of our farmhouse, with tight skates, skates that wouldn’t fall off of our feet, a Sunoco hockey stick in hand, bought for 99 cents, earned by picking ten baskets of tomatoes, earning ten cents per basket. We bought bubble gum with the extra penny.

We started across the yard in our skates. We crossed the gravel road, climbed through the ditch, got soaked, as the ice over the water broke through, climbed our way up the ditch bank and started the long journey across the plowed field, in the general direction of Gabe’s pond.

We didn’t know for sure if we were going in exactly the right direction because the snow lashed us. Ice pellets whipped at us. It was not snow. It was more like ice, driven at us by a cross wind. It blew in our face. It blew in our eyes. It blew all over and it swirled too. We looked up into the white sky and we looked at the white ahead, to the white on both sides of us. We looked back for home, but couldn’t find it. It was white in that direction too.

We walked and walked, sometimes falling down as we slid into the furrows and holes left by the uneven plowing. It took us an hour or so to reach the Puce creek. To our dismay, it was running water, fairly deep. There was no ice on it. We knew we could cross it by walking through it, but the water would be at least chest-deep. We looked around for something to use as a bridge to cross the creek, but couldn’t find anything. Then, we came across a heavy frozen tree limb. We pushed and tugged at it, like big forwards working in the corners, tugging and pulling at a branch that was much bigger than we were strong.

After a long time, we got it unstuck and rolled it to the water’s edge. We then held one end of the log and let the current push the other out over the water. We watched as it lodged on a sand bar. We started to cross it, unsure of ourselves. We carefully climbed out, reached the end of it, and jumped. We didn’t make the edge of the bank of the creek, but to our surprise, we were only ankle deep in water. We chopped through it like miniature football players going through tires, chopped onto the bank and kept chopping with our feet, all the way up the slippery bank. We had made it. We really were hockey players now.

We ran triumphantly to Gabe's pond, running as fast as we could toward the ice.

“Watch the ice,” Ed called, “we’ve gone through a few times.”

We didn’t even care. We ran onto it and really skated.

“Wait until they see how we can play hockey with our skates tight,” we thought.

Didn’t they know our skates were tight? When it came time to pick the teams, we were still chosen last. We’d show them and we did. We even touched the puck a few times that afternoon. I swatted it away from one of the big guys, when he had a scoring chance. I swatted it away with my stick and shot it right into a hole in the ice. They had to stop the game to get it.

“Put your hand down there and find it,” someone said.

“You shot it in.”

I gladly put my arm into the icy water, all the way in, swished at the muddy bottom of the pond and came up with it.

“You made a good play,” Harv said, the big guy I swatted the puck from. “You made a good play,” he said as I smiled. I smiled over and over that day, because I had made a good play.

We played until after dark, about five hours that day. I was hungry. I was too hungry to walk home on wet, icy skates. I didn’t have my boots with me. I tried to unlace my skates, so I could walk home in bare feet, but the laces were frozen tightly in place.

I was thinking I could run home, in bare feet. It wouldn’t take too long, but I couldn’t get the skates off. So, I started toward the creek with my skates on. I walked to the edge of the creek, slipped, rolled down the bank and lay with my back down in the icy cold ankle-deep water. I didn’t look for the branch we had used to cross the creek the first time. Instead, I got up and waded across the water, one step at a time. I felt the ice cold water flood over my belt, down my pant legs. It was cold, but I trudged forward, as a soldier does.

I plowed through the water up the other side of the bank and lay there, wet and exhausted at the top of it.

“I don’t have to play hockey anymore, so it doesn’t matter if I’m wet,” I thought.

I fell to the ground, rested a few minutes, and then started the walk across the plowed field toward home. I noticed my pant legs start to freeze.

“It has gotten colder now,” I thought. “My pant legs are freezing,” I thought further. I have kneepads now,” I thought and as they hardened, I smiled a little more. I smiled more as it began to snow.

I walked across the plowed field for a long time, not making progress quickly. I walked and walked; then I walked some more. The faint lights at the farm weren’t getting brighter very fast. My legs burned. I was completely exhausted even before I had started across the field. I felt I couldn’t walk any more, but still I walked. I walked in my skates, with pant legs frozen as knee pads, holding my hockey stick with frozen hands. I was wet, but I didn’t walk sadly. I walked as a hockey player, one short hockey player step after another.

The muscles in my legs burned on the inside. I had never experienced that before. They burned intensely. The burning seemed to seize them up. I was a six-year-old boy then, with the body size of a five-year-old. I wanted to go. I tried to go and I went. But, I didn’t go very fast. In fact, I was working harder all the time, but going slower. All at once, I sat down in a furrow, without thinking, reflexively. I didn’t think about it that way, but I couldn’t walk any further. I felt comfortable, sitting there in the cold.

Finally, as I sat there in the middle of the plowed field, I heard an angel calling. My mother, who wasn’t sure if I had gone to Gabe’s pond, had been looking for me for about an hour or two. She had become quite worried.

“Mom!” I yelled, but she didn’t hear me. But my leg muscles revived a little. I was moving again, not very fast, but moving.

When she heard me, she ran across the plowed field quickly. She seemed to know how to do it. The furrows didn’t seem to slow her down. When she got to me, I thought she would be angry. Instead, she picked me up.

“Silly boy,” she said. “You’re all wet.”

I wanted to tell her about it. I couldn’t walk anymore, but I had big news. I wanted to tell her the big news.

“I made a good play at hockey,” I said finally. “I swatted the puck away from a big guy. I shot it right into a hole in the ice. They said I made a good play too. I think they’re going to let me play on Gabe’s pond, whenever I can get there.”

“That’s good,” she said, “but you need a bath to warm you up.”