My friend Paul and his buds grew up playing hockey on the lake near his home. There was a current on one side of the lake, and the ice was thinner there. The kids knew they needed to stay away from that area. They also took their hockey seriously. For those reasons, the preferred area of the lake for hockey bordered right up against the thin ice, and the boys tried whenever possible to check their opponents onto that ice.
Why? “Because then they’d fall through and have to go home and change their clothes and their team would have to play a man short,” Paul explained yesterday, barely refraining from adding “D’uh!” What’s more, he said, he played hockey in figure skates, because that’s what he had.
“Were they white?” I asked him.
“They were black,” he assured me. “I wouldn’t have worn white.”
Skate color was crucial information for me. When I was in high school, our family moved to a place where all skaters, male or female, wore black skates. In my mind, that was a bridge too far, and I didn’t skate during the two years I lived there. My sister Marilyn, however, embraced the change and just wore the black skates. In fact, she took up speed skating, at which she excelled. Her speed skates were black as well.
When I told her about Paul playing hockey in figure skates, she said, “Good for him. They have toe picks. You have to be really good to play hockey and go zooming around and turning and stopping fast with toe picks.”
I told Paul about skating in the poorly drained cornfield across the street from our house when we were kids. How we’d slog all the way to the far end of the field and unzip our jackets. Then we’d hold our jackets open like sails and let the wind blow us all the way back to where we’d started.
“We’d go so fast!” I told him.
“And there was corn stubble in the field?” he checked.
“Yup. You had to make sure you stayed between the rows.”
This is when Paul announced that he and his friends had rigged sails for their sleds so they could go fast across flat ground. And one winter, he said, some people were getting rid of a chest freezer and, being conscientious adults, removed the top of the freezer so no kids could accidentally get stuck inside. What they didn’t count on was kids getting inside on purpose. Paul and his buds appropriated the chest. As a sort of bobsled. They’d climb aboard their massive vehicle and ride it down the hill.
“The thing was, though, the hill ended at a creek. You had to get out before you got there, if you didn’t want to get wet,” Paul explained. It must have been quite a sight, the freezer sliding downhill through the snow, little heads peering out to gauge proximity to the creek, then the whole gang erupting out the top, and the appliance splashing into the water. Hauling that puppy back up the hill for the next run must have been quite the feat.
“Did your parents know about this?” I inquired.
“Are you kidding? No, and we never told them.”
One of the students at French class today expressed surprise that there were no children out sledding today. She was met with incredulous looks as people reminded her that the temperature today is hovering either side of zero, with a wind chill of eleventy-seven below.
“I played outside in weather like this,” she protested, and I pictured Paul and friends in their freezer chest. If the creek had frozen solid, just think how far they could have slid, zinging across the watercourse and stopping who knows where.
Thurston Pond is deep in ice again, and hockey players have reestablished their rinks. There’s no perimeter loop just yet, so the skaters braving the cold are either forging their own recreational trails or sticking to the rinks. There’s no one out there now, though. Sunshine or no sunshine, today is just too cold.
Even the dog was cold on our walk this morning. He’s eighteen years old, and this is the first time we’ve seen him cold. He was shivering hard by the time we got back inside after a brief walk. He’s just back from his afternoon walk, which was an all-time quickie. Seriously cold weather, it seems, Rascal on what’s important. The sooner home, the sooner warm. And the sooner we decant him from his penguin sweater, the sooner he gets a treat. Our dog likes winter, even in this cold.
23 January 2026