I myself continue to skate and enjoy our winter conditions, but as I do, I am mindful of the duty we all have to ensure that future generations will experience the same magnificent enjoyment of this splendid season.
I welcome Darryl and William Humber’s book, which is not only sounding an alarm about the threat to our outdoor winter sports, but also reminding us how joyful those activities continue to be. Theirs is a message of hope that something can be done to ensure winter’s long-term health.
The people in Mississauga are trying to do their part to keep the ice frozen and the hills alive with the sound of toboggans. I have no plans to pack my skates away anytime soon!
Hazel McCallion, C.M.
Mayor
We begin by thanking the folks at Dundurn Press and Jane Gibson and Barry Penhale in particular. Their imprint, Natural Heritage Books, is now part of a significant Canadian publishing presence. These are challenging times for the makers of books and hopefully we are, in our small way by investing countless hours in research and writing, doing our part to keep this miracle of human culture alive and thriving.
This is Darryl’s first work of non-fiction, having completed two works of fiction in the last four years. For Bill, (or William, as he prefers his byline to read) it is his eleventh. Past efforts have included those on baseball, soccer, and bicycling, and two with Natural Heritage, one on both Darryl and Bill’s hometown, Bowmanville, Ontario, and the other on African-Canadian athletes.
We salute the patience and help of many, including Darryl and Bill’s family members — mother/wife Cathie, brother/son Brad, sister/daughter Karen, uncle/brother Larry (whose art designs were wonderful), aunt/ sister Mary, grandmother/mother-in-law Ruth, and for Darryl, Ann-Marie Gazley, who also chipped in with research support.
For making this book possible, we thank the brilliant graphic artist Aleks Janicijevic, the escapee from London’s February 2009 winter surprise Leeroy Murray, the proofreading brilliance and critical comments of Sally Moore, Todd Latham, and Suzanne Elston. Resources and research were provided by the dean of hockey researchers, Bill Fitsell, and another Society for International Hockey Research stalwart, Martin Harris.
Colleagues at Seneca with whom Bill works on matters related to climate change include Mary Dawson, Roy Paluoja, Gary Johnson, Carolyn Anderson, Steve Wilson, Ken Ellis, and countless others who will torment him with cries of, “Why didn’t you mention me?”
We dedicate this book to the memory of Alfred Humber, the grandfather/father of Darryl and Bill, in recognition of his long nights of backyard ice-making. Neither he nor the mysterious lady in our introduction who befriended Joseph Atkinson could have known they would find their way into a book so many years later. The good they did, however, lives forever and this is its small reward.
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
ONE 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.