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