Blade rumor

Adventures in pond skating and outdoor camping

by Sally Cragin

Illustration by Michelle Barbera

Tritown has no shortage of skating ponds (and, perversely, no shortage of skating rinks either). The benefits of New England's glacial topography include ponds, lakes, streams, and swamps that freeze as smooth as a makeup mirror in winter. Ward the Pond Hockey Pro watches the surface quality of his neighborhood watersheds with great interest and is (almost) willing to yank his kids from school on days when the ice is glassy and the surface plowed.

"Education and snow removal -- the biggest bang for your tax dollar in Tritown," he comments. "What else do we have: Sewerage? Trash removal? Public transportation? Nah, but we have some of the best plowed ponds in the area."

Ward and his longtime ice rivals, Whitey and Bob Leblanc, are out on Lake Tritown long before the volunteer fire department has checked the ice. Sticks in hand, sons and daughters whizzing across the ice, theirs is a multigenerational rivalry -- a hockey game that's gone on for nearly 30 years. Sometimes Hollis the Mountain Man's Aunt Winnie (short for Winnepesaukee, though she never learned to swim) takes her old lace-up figure skates down to the pond "to risk a hip," she jokes. She invariably finds Ward and the Leblancs flying at each other with sticks. "They haven't changed one iota," she tells Hollis, "from when they were obstreperous little boys in Sunday school, stealing from each others' mite boxes."

Among the three men, there are barely enough real teeth to go around, and all of them could use more cartilage, but their energy on the ice is indefatigable. Of course, this crowd spends the majority of winter at the Tritown Municipal Rink. But if given the choice, they'll hit the natural ice every time.

Now, pond hockey is a slightly different game than regular rink hockey. Because of the inconsistent quality of the surface, which can be pitted, slushy, cracked, bubbly, rutted, or snowy, skaters have to work much harder just to move the puck along. "On the pond, you do a lot of `stick handling,'" explains Ward. "On a rink, that's too much maneuvering, also called `over-deeking.'" And whereas regular hockey has two-minute rest periods when you can sit on the bench, on the pond, hockey players skate continuously. This builds endurance -- also exhaustion. Pond hockey skaters tend to regard those who just skate on a rink as somewhat spoiled, and some rink skaters regard pond skaters as barbarians. Someone who skates in both places can have a difficult time making the transition. An afternoon on the pond will dull the sharpest blades. And the rules of pond hockey (which can also be played with brooms and a rubber gym ball -- broom hockey) have variations from the regular game.

"We just have three rules," says Ward. "No checking, no [puck] lifting, and no whining. Violate any of those rules, and it's a penalty shot." Given Whitey's notoriously poor sportsmanship, occasionally things turn ugly on the ice, though usually not lethal.

Although definitely dangerous at times, pond hockey (and outdoor skating in general) has one grand advantage over the domestic rinks: the possibility of going through the ice. Now, you may not think this is a boon, but there is no greater provider of adrenaline than the whip-crack of shifting ice floes.

Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) is an avid outdoor skater. Although she's fallen through the ice a couple of times, she's not deterred in her enjoyment.

"Ice tends to be thickest in the center and thinnest at the edges, which seems counter-intuitive," she says. "But the times I've gone through have always been near the banks, where the ice is thinnest when the sun's been shining. Fortunately, Picture Pond is pretty shallow, so I didn't go much past my knees. Just enough to make it memorable."

On the day she goes through, Hollis had been stationed on the porch and had warned her before she went out. He'd heard the rifle-shots of settling ice all morning, and the weather had been above-freezing too often. But Delia is so damn gung ho -- too gung ho. It is a good thing she's wearing a bright pink parka when she goes down. Also a good thing he happens to look out his kitchen window. "All I saw was bubbly black ice," Delia sputters after he pulls her to safety.

"That's not ice," Hollis remonstrates. "That's slush waiting to happen. When the weather's so up-and-down, it's like active platetectonics. Nothing but shifting ice bergs."

"Well, even after plunging through the ice," Delia says with finality. "It's still a damn sight safer than Whitey and Ward's pond hockey game."

WE MAY THINK WE have harsh winters in Tritown, but even a 100-inch year is nothing compared to what John Hornby endured in the Canadian "Barren Lands." In Malcolm Waldron's Snow Man (first published in 1931, recently reprinted by Kodansha International) an account of Hornby's travels with one-time Bengal Lancer James C. Critchell-Bullock, and his final, ill-fated journey, you'll find a harrowing adventure set in a wintry landscape. "If a trek wasn't difficult or a portage backbreaking, he would try to make it so," writes former Tritownie Lawrence Millman in the introduction. "Not for [Hornby] the overcooked fare or his countrymen: he preferred his meat raw or, even better, putrid. Such habits invariably contributed to his reputation as `The Hermit of the Arctic.'"

Hornby made his trips in the early 1920s, traveling in the harsh, Arctic region north of the Yukon. Here there is no forest (thus no fuel for fire), only migrating animals (thus no assured food supply), frozen sod, the occasional stream, and "sand and gravel and useless moss." Neither geographer, anthropologist, zoologist, or cartographer, this English-born outdoorsman was a pure adventurer with, as it turns out, a vast capacity for hardship. He and Critchell-Bullock spent one winter burrowed into an esker (a glacial ridge of sand and gravel), and Hornby was the kind of camper who cleaned animals on his sleeping bag. There was never any specific point to his expeditions -- he might bring back a set of caribou antlers or mouse carcasses after a journey lasting several months. Or nothing but stories.

Snow Man is in the spirit of adventure tales, which never quite go out of fashion. Author Waldron's style is casual, informative, and humorous as he describes Critchell-Bullock's awe at his hardy companion in escapade after escapade. After Hornby was immersed in an icy creek, the pair found they lacked sufficient fuel for a roaring fire to dry out his clothes. Sleeping in sodden clothes would have led to hypothermia and then death in anyone else. Not so for Hornby.

"`See here --'" he tells Critchell-Bullock. "`That wretched fire of yours will never dry out these clothes. And if I sit here they may freeze on me. It's cold enough. I'd better run a bit.'" Hornby grinned, stood up, and was gone. He melted into the darkness like a shot . . . and was gone more than an hour. He came into the tent with eyes and cheeks glowing. He looked fresh as morning. His clothes were still wet. He didn't bother with them, but blew out the candle and wriggled, fully clothed, between the blankets of his sleeping-bag. He was asleep almost at once."

Sally Cragin reminds everyone that you skate on frozen ponds (and explore the Canadian Barren Lands) at your own risk.

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