February 2008

The “team” in Plaster Rock shares three time zones.

Hockey stick slung over my shoulder like a farmer’s hoe, skates dangling from the shaft – it’s the traditional pose of a player going to a frozen pond or outdoor rink. It’s how I always made my way to the river behind our house in the winter while growing up in Windsor, Ontario — trudging quietly through the snow with one of my brothers and pulling a sled carrying a younger sibling. Several decades later I am striking a similar pose but with a longer journey ahead, not climbing over the tracks but traveling on them on a 22-hour train journey. The game still beckons.

I’m on my way to Plaster Rock, New Brunswick for the World Pond Hockey Championship. The frozen fields and a few provinces glide by; a coat hanger clanging on the wall of the adjoining compartment keeps me awake, and rekindles memories of pond hockey-playing days gone by …

My dad is teaching my older brother and me how to take a pass. Dressed in his green rubber boots and holding a hockey stick like he was pounding in a fence post along our small potato field, he sends the puck hurtling towards us at such a speed we aren’t sure if he is passing the puck or imitating Bobby Hull taking a slapshot.

Our train pulls into Miramichi, N.B. station in the late morning. I step onto the platform with a hockey stick in my hand, a canoe pack filled with long-johns on my back, and no particular plan for covering the remaining 170 kilometres to Plaster Rock. There is no bus, and the train abandoned this route long ago.

Another passenger on the platform notices my stick, and says, “Y’er goin’ to Plaster Rock, are ya. … Do you need a ride?”  The hockey gods are smiling on me.

About 500 other players are making their way to the frozen lake at Plaster Rock (pop. 1,200). Many are coming from far away places — not only Alberta, British Columbia, and several American states but unlikely places like Puerto Rico, Egypt, and the Cayman Islands. Or so they say. In fact most are Canadians, drawn home by their childhood game.

The town has prepared a grand welcome. We parade to the lake behind our provincial, state, or national flags. Twenty rinks on the lake have been carefully measured and cleared. Specially-made nets spare our boots from the indignity of serving as goal posts. We don’t even have to worry about freezing our fingers to lace up skates: a heated tent awaits.

I feel both overdressed, and under-dressed. I’m in my going-to-the-outdoor-rink attire: a bright Guatemalan tuque, two left-handed mitts, and my dad’s old fireman’s coat with its telescopic sleeves (the only label that has survived the years). If other players have inherited the coats of their fathers, they are not wearing them. Indeed, most are dressed not only in matching jerseys but matching pants!

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Portable lights give a warm glow to the fir and spruce trees, branches heavy with snow, that frame the lake. My heart beats faster, as it always does when I approach a rink for a game. This location may be new to me but the sound of skates cutting into the ice, pucks cracking against sticks, and the wind rustling through the trees are comfortingly familiar.

At 6:20 pm, ten minutes to game-time, the opposing team is skating eager loops. I am still a team of one. I had alerted the organizers that my recruiting efforts had fallen somewhat short — to be precise, three players shy of a full team of four. My brothers turned out to be unenthusiastic about traveling 1,500 kilometres to play shinny, and my baby sister is past the age of accepting bribes to play goal. Two Albertans and a local player have been put on my team but the Albertans have been snow-delayed and the local player is nowhere to be seen.

At 6:24 pm, my first teammate arrives; by 6:25 our team, representing three time zones, is at full strength. I smile back at the gods — they favour a fair match.

We introduce ourselves in the spartan manner of shinny players with “Hi” and “Robert”, “T.J.”, “Derek”. We confer on the game plan. “Score a lot of goals,” Robert offers. We reflect on the plan, and nod in agreement.

It is a good plan. In fact, we score the prodigious sum of 11 goals in our first match –a total that is exceeded only by our opponents, who score 26. I rationalize that such accounting is inappropriate for shinny — a perspective reinforced after being outscored in three of our next four games during the four-day tourney. “There are two kinds of players here,” one opponent observes with a swig from a clandestine bottle. “Those who come to win and those who come to have a good time.” I reckon he is in the latter group – and, based on our stats, so are we.

While the players are having a good time — or winning — an army of volunteers maintains the rinks, sells food, or passes out friendly smiles. There is no obvious hierarchy, or apparent ego: the deputy mayor, a retired RCMP officer, patrols the lake picking up litter. The money raised from the tournament will help pay for the town’s indoor arena. It’s clear that the community knows how to work together; the  closing of the mill a few years ago, like other hardships, will be overcome.

After the final games are played everyone heads back home to spouses, children, and jobs, as we would have returned to moms, dads, a warm meal, and homework years ago.  I end up in the same cabin, of the same train, with the same clanging coat hanger on the adjoining wall keeping me awake.  The hockey gods want to make sure I have time to savour the goals scored, to lament the near misses, and to celebrate the beauty of our game.

Plaster Rock’s World Pond Hockey Championship takes place in February of each year.