Ice Hockey, Rural Oregon Style

I was sent to a Las Vegas conference when I lived in Nevada, and as usual, I got lost in one of the huge hotels that hosted a hockey tournament.

I could never seem to find my way anywhere; my sense of direction has failed me on more than one occasion. 

This time my lack of navigation took me really far out of my way from the conference I was supposed to be attending, into the depths below an enormous convention center.

I wandered down a long empty hall and heard raucous noise coming from the end of it through some closed double doors.  Since there were no signs restricting my access, I pushed one open just in time to see a guy’s face splat loudly into the Plexiglas wall of the hockey rink directly in front of me!  That was my formal introduction to the world of hockey. After my startled shriek above the noise gained rink attention, the players went back to their practice, and I went to sit quietly on the empty bleachers to watch.  I tried to understand the rules of this seemingly wild violent sport, of which there seemed to be none.  Being a spectator in this formal venue took me much further away though than the conference room I couldn’t find; it took me on a journey back to a cold winter in my childhood, to a large frozen pond at the edge of our property in rural Oregon. 

The sounds of the rink in front of me faded as I flashed back to a game we played with household brooms and a block of ice the size of a softball that we chipped from a corner of the pond that bordered our property.  

The present-day conference and hockey game unfolding before me were forgotten; I reminisced about how my family used brooms to sweep the ice clear of snow and then set up game boundaries.  Our “nets” were the short bushes at either end of the pond and there were so many children in my large family that we almost had enough players to have our own team.  Neighbors and friends came to play; not everyone possessed skates, so snow boots adorned many pairs of feet. At every opportunity, we swatted each other, both same and opposing teammates, with our brooms and then either ducked or leapt out of the way when the ice missile flew in our direction. Laughter made it difficult to play our games seriously because I’m sure the rules of modern hockey did not include being tagged with our type of ‘stick’ nor using such a potential weapon as a puck!  I never dared to attempt to halt the block of flying ice when it came my way (masks and helmets were unheard of) and instead preferred to do my own thing on the ice, participating only when vitally necessary.  Nobody was ever sure who really won or that there were really no rules to follow; none of that mattered since the laughter, cheering, and camaraderie more than made up for any scoreboard celebration.  Afterwards, everyone packed up skates and brooms and trudged back through the snow to our house for hot chocolate and to regale my mother with the finer points of the games that day.

I popped back into the present when the buzzer shrilled that sounded the end of the practice in the rink in front of me and the surrounding noise came back into my consciousness. I gave the players a wide smile while thinking just how much they reminded me of my family and I stood up and departed the way I’d come, grateful for the memories and that my sense of direction had failed me on this occasion.