Pond Hockey

When the temperature rises for a day or two and then freezes again without a snowstorm, the winter ponds in New England beckon for a good game of ice hockey. When times like these occurred on the weekend or over vacation, my son and I (jkz) would put on layers of warm clothing, grab our sticks and pucks and skates, and head down to the pond below the hill. There we would don our skates, struggling with the long laces with freezing fingers until they were pulled tight enough, waddle over the remaining feet of snow, and touch new freedom at the ice edge.

We would skate around for a while, inspecting the ice all over the pond, adjusting to the feeling of being on skates once again. Then we would carefully select a spot and set up a goal with a pair of boots set a few feet apart.

We played one on one… one of us defending the goal while the other came at it with the puck. The defender had broad latitude to come out of the goal and try to take the puck away from his opponent, so there was lots of fast skating all over the pond, clashing of sticks, racing to get to the puck first. There were fakes and lots of shooting, chases, and bumps as we maneuvered around each other with exhilarating swiftness and laughter. And of course, there was lots of scoring, and the sheer joy of sensing the puck sail past the defender and through the boots, sometimes on highly improbable trajectories that made us laugh.

As we played, we generated heat. No matter how cold the day, how biting the wind, after a time the hats would come off, and the gloves, then the coats and sweaters. Sometimes we would be down to just shirts on top. As long as we kept skating, we stayed warm.

We played for hours. There was never a time that wasn’t the best time. Every time was just now, beyond thought, caught up in the joy of sharing what always felt like a particularly male energy in going up against each other time and time again, coming in with the puck, chasing one another, blocking shots, protecting the goal.

Sometimes we played at night, in the orange gloom of one tall floodlight put up by the town, hardly able to see the puck in the shadows. But most of the time, we played in the afternoon, on and on, as the winter sun moved toward its early exit. At times, we had to stop and catch our breath. Lying on our coats spread open on the snow at the edge of the pond and watching the clouds against the deep blue of the sky, or the strands of pinks and golds beginning to show themselves in the west, our breath visible in the air above us, we would revel in silence and perfection.

I would like to say we did this every weekend for years and years, but we didn’t, and those days now seem long past. And I would like to say that my girls and I had similar feelings when we played pond hockey, and we did on rare occasions. The girls were drawn to other things. They loved to skate, and they skated better than we did, but they lacked interest in the game of stick, puck, goal, and pursuit.

Most of the time, the pond was covered with snow or rough ice and was unskatable. Some winters, it wasn’t frozen enough when we wanted it to be. And we had other things calling us as well, and other chances to be together. But none was ever better than playing hockey on the winter pond.