The Place Dreams Come True

The jagged peaks of the mountains surrounding the valley stretched the clear sky between them like the skin of deep blue drum. The sun, pausing at the zenith, cast a shadowless bright light on the dark ice of the frozen lake in the valley’s center. A dozen or more kids and a handful of adults swarmed over the dark ice like atoms, racing from end to end of the oversized rink chasing the darting of a jet black puck.

Aside from the metal, fire-engine-red goals at each end, the only man-made structure visible was the long wooden bench Evan found himself on. He couldn’t remember how long he’d been sitting there basking in the sun, nor could he remember plodding through the deep snow from the road where he assumed he’d parked his car, but he felt happy to be here as he smiled into the warm sunshine pouring over the skin of his face. After a lung-filling breath of cold mountain air, Evan leaned over his red sweatpants to tighten the laces of his skates. Sitting back, he pulled a small toque on over the top of his head and donned his hockey gloves, then grabbed the stick leaning on the bench beside him. One step with his left foot and a push with his right and he glided out through a gap in the snowbanks and onto the soccer-field-sized rink.

Over a cotton sweatshirt and a thin under layer, Evan wore the white jersey of a team he’d played for many years before, so he angled to the right to slide in behind the team clad in white. He didn’t recognize many of the faces, but he knew enough of them that he was welcomed into the team by a shout and a pass of the puck. He took a couple of strides in the clear before a young boy of maybe 12 wearing a dark-blue jersey approached him and Evan passed the puck to an open teammate.

In addition to the standard-issue hockey equipment of skates, gloves and a stick, everyone on the ice wore a similar outfit: sweatpants, a jersey over a hoodie or sweatshirt, and a toque or baseball cap above a pair of sunglasses. Skin tones ranged from bright white to tan to red based on how long the person had been playing beneath the high-elevation sunshine. There were young boys and girls, and a couple of men and women on each team, and a fully-clad goalie at each net. The younger kids tended to swarm around the puck while the older players spread out and away from the frenzy. And like everyone else, Evan found himself unable to contain a broad smile.

The dance of offense and defense surged in either direction as the teams traded possession of the puck, and after a couple of hours after Evan had joined the game, the goalie in white made a save and steered the puck away from the net. Evan gathered up the puck and swung wide, striding in the other direction with his right hand atop his stick that pushed the puck before him as his left arm swung back and forth to generate speed. Two dark-clad kids angled toward him and Evan passed the puck between their skates to a teammate near the center. He continued his route as the kids circled to follow the puck and a moment later Evan received the puck back as his speed increased. Striding past an opposing wall of kids, Evan began to curl toward the opposing net. An adult defender angled toward him and reached out in an attempt to knock the puck away but Evan slid the disc through the gap between the man’s stick and his skate. A youngster of about 10 wearing black sweats and a white jersey received the pass in a clearing behind the defender and quickly slapped the puck past the dark goalie.

The goalscorer whooped and threw his arms into the air, hopping on his skates as the dark team regrouped and the goalie fished the puck out of the net. In the moments before the game resumed, Evan glided behind the goal and took the scene in: still the sun blazed high overhead, still the blue sky was unblemished by a single cloud, and no one on either team showed the slightest inclination to stop playing anytime soon. It seemed to Evan this game could go on forever and he hoped it might.

A moment earlier, in a hospice center in New England, the on-call doctor placed the stethoscope back around his neck before turning off the heart monitor beside him. Then he turned back to close the eyes of the now-late Evan McIlheny.

Practice, ,

Stormy Weather

Sunday night’s wind blew sand off the beach and into the streets of Plum Island

In the fine tradition of big-ass North Atlantic storms around Halloween (see: the so-called “perfect storm” of 1991; hurricane Sandy, 2012), New England got hit by a doozy of a tempest this past Sunday night, Oct. 29. Spawned by the atmospheric marriage of the remains of tropical storm Phillipe and a cold front moving off the mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S., Sunday’s night storm brought ferocious winds and heavy rains to the northeastern part of the country — including my snug-and-cozy domicile on the quaint little sand dune known as Plum Island.

Oh, baby! Did it blow Sunday night! We had a storm back in March — a standard winter nor’easter — that delivered official winds as high as 77 mph and was as impressive as any I’d ever seen at Plum Island, but Sunday night’s storm was different. For starters, in this storm the wind came out of the east-southeast. That may not seem like a big deal but my home is aligned northeast-to-southwest, so the wider side of of the house bore the brunt of Sunday night’s winds. And those winds, while less than March’s winds — highest velocities were in the 60s — were sustained for several hours, prompting me to actually start to wonder if something major was going to happen to the house. I had fears of the solar panels getting yanked off and taking the roof with it, or the decks (which my brother is currently rebuilding) blowing down, or windows caving in, or…

Monday morning broke sunny and beautiful, but the ocean was a little worked up…

In the end, we had it pretty easy. The extent of the damage was limited to leaks on the windward side of the house and a bunch of shingles on the newly repaired roof being torn off. The former occurred in areas my brother and I had earlier this autumn identified as needing replacement so there was no surprise there, while the latter is covered by the manufacturer since they were just installed a month ago. So…no big deal. Hell, our electricity didn’t even blink.

But driving around the following evening (Monday being hockey night, after all), the damage was pretty amazing. Heading into Newburyport, the opposite side of the Merrimack River was eerily dark as Salisbury remained without power. And several other towns in Essex County were not only still dark but trees were down everywhere, several roads remained closed and crews were still at work clearing debris off power lines. Hockey went on as scheduled (whew!) but two days later there remains a lot of work to be done. Apparently, some 300,000 people in Massachusetts were without power for various lengths of time (some remain without power through Wednesday). Up in Maine, many places are also still without power. And there is plenty of damage to both property and forest throughout New England.

And another thought occurred to me as I lay awake Sunday night between 3 and 4 a.m. during the peak winds: our winds, while certainly fierce, were less than half what Barbuda, St. Martin, Dominica, the BVIs and Puerto Rico (and other places) endured during hurricanes Irma and Maria — and those places had those incomprehensible winds for the better part of a day, not just a few hours. (Our storm was moving at 50+ mph when it hit New England so it blew right through; those hurricanes took their damned sweet time as they obliterated those islands.) So while I was feeling humbled as I listened to the wind and felt the house shake, I knew I had it pretty damned easy. (And one other, somewhat related thought occurred to me also: the thought of being at sea in such winds — an uncommon though not rare event — was frightening. But that’s something I’ll have to worry about later.)

This photo was posted to Facebook on Monday. I wonder who that “lone loco surfer” could be? Hmm…

Of course, I did get to enjoy some benefits of the storm. The waves kicked up Sunday night were quite large on Monday — too large to venture into until Monday afternoon, and even then it was 100 percent ludicrous as the winds, now blowing westerly or offshore, were still steady in the high 30s, so the currents were crazy and getting into a wave was damned near impossible. But venture out I did, and I stayed for two whole waves before I pulled the chute. Tuesday saw much smaller but still fun longboard waves, which I enjoyed for a couple of chilly hours. The Atlantic is cooling down…

Just another autumn in New England.

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The Highlight(s) of My Week

Is it the hockey itself, the playing, that made my Friday evenings the highlight of my winter? Was it the camaraderie in the locker room and on the bench, a bunch of men (and a couple of women) ranging in age from teenager to 60-something all gathered for the common love of a game? Maybe it was simply the winding drive through the rolling forests and swirling creek bottoms of southeastern New Hampshire, the New England farmhouses with their white siding and green shutters peeking through the trees.

Whatever it was, getting involved with the Friday-night skate at a local prep school was the one part of each week that was inviolable. But with the end of scholastic hockey season in early March (while I was celebrating my birthday by surfing in Mexico), the school had shut off the rink’s compressors, putting an end to my weekly sessions. I was bereft. What was I to do? Like a junkie going through withdrawal, I’d begun to hallucinate upon my return from Mexico.

Even in sunny San Diego there’s fun hockey to be found (photo courtesy: Jeremy Spitzberg)

I’ve written before of the joy I take in playing hockey, the pure Zen I experience when I’m on the ice. And every winter — save one: the year I lived in Austin, Texas — since I started playing the game in 1971 I have played hockey. Even San Diego afforded me the chance to skate regularly and achieve temporary satori.

Fortunately, I recently connected with another group that has doubled my weekly hockey dose. The new group skates twice a week at another local prep school, this one about a half-hour south of my home and reached by taking an even more scenic drive through quaint, picturesque New England towns than my winter drive north. We play later in the evening so the late-night drives home through those sleepy — and sleeping — towns scratches my Robert Frost-induced Yankeephile itch. And while the competition is not as strong as the winter skate, it’s still solid and challenging, and there are always two goalies — a rare occasion in the pick-up skates I had been attending to fill the void.

I don’t know how far into the spring or summer I’ll skate with this group, but the instant community that engulfed me once the puck was dropped my first time out and I could show what I was capable of has been comforting to this curmudgeonly hermit. As an added bonus, the workouts (and their timing) has helped me keep off the weight I lost in Mexico. And then, of course, there are those fleeting glimpses of nirvana when my blades hit the ice with each shift…

New England, Personal,