Introduction

I can tell you exactly when and where it started: March 2001, on Lac Croche, near Saint-Donat, in the Laurentians in Quebec. My parents live on the shore of Lac Croche. We were there to visit and ski for March break.

Normally, Lac Croche is buried in snow by March. It’s common practice to shovel off the roof in mid-winter, leaving a pile of snow so big it will take you right onto the top of the house, as if you were going upstairs. Snow forts are great fun. There is a network of snowmobile trails throughout the area, good cross-country skiing and some of the most developed ski areas in the country.

Skating, though, can be tricky.

First of all, Lac Croche isn’t really a lake at all. It’s a loopy detour in the Ouareau River, and there are currents that shift the ice, making slushy patches that won’t usually give out completely, but will soak you from the knees down. The same snow that is a blessing for every other winter activity makes a decent rink almost impossible. Most years it starts accumulating before the lake has really frozen and insulates the slushy mess below, keeping it that way all winter. If, by chance, there is good ice at the start of the season, shovelling it can take an hour or two per day, and even then the ice ends up pitted, flaky and riddled with cracks that will swallow a skate blade whole and give the skater above a very nasty surprise. Most of the time, bringing skates to Lac Croche indicated unrealistic expectations at best.

Unrealistic expectations were not at all out of character for me at the time. I was in the eleventh year of a marriage that had barely survived on a mixed diet of determination, denial and fevered dependence on whatever good times happened along. I counted on March break at Lac Croche to be one of those times. The place held wonderful childhood memories for me, and between days spent in winter beauty and evenings spent with warm, homemade meals in a loving, stable home, I allowed myself to feel I was providing my children some of the luxuries I’d grown up with myself.

The winter of 2001 was an El Niño winter. January and February saw several thaws, and by March, instead of mountains of snow, there was a rotting grey carpet on the forest floor with cruddy spots of gravel and leaves poking through. It rained all day Tuesday, and the temperature dropped to minus-30 that night. The cross-country trails were treacherous, the ski hills were bulletproof, and even a walk through the woods became a trial: the crust on the snow wouldn’t hold you up, but with each step you would mangle your shins. March break wasn’t looking dependable at all.

The lake ice, though, was spectacular. The sky was clear and blue on Wednesday morning, and the frozen lake was glassy and smooth from one side clear across to the other, with only faint ridges where snowmobile tracks had been, and not a speck of snow.

It was a good thing we’d decided to bring the skates. Melissa, who was six, was still somewhat tentative about it, but when she did skate, she did it with the same steady determination that she’d bring to most tasks. If she got what she felt was too much encouragement, or if what we called encouragement had become something more like parental pressure, she’d go inside.

Eight-year-old Wesley was somewhat keener. We’d started him skating when he was three, and he cried most the time. It wasn’t much fun. But on his fourth birthday, in December of the next winter, he figured it out. I took him to the gate at the outdoor public rink. He held the boards for a second, pushed off and skated a full lap, his eyes full of wonder. “I can skate now,” he said. "Because I’m four.”

We signed him up for a power skating and hockey program that winter. It wasn’t entirely successful. Sometimes he was discouraged. Sometimes he said everyone else was better than him. Sometimes all he wanted to do was go home. Like a few other dads, I started going out on the ice, too, to try and boost his confidence, and that’s how, in my mind, hockey became a game that Wesley played with my help.

In his second year I signed on as an assistant coach of his house-league team. The year after that the games were at 6:30, Saturday mornings. Wesley and I are both morning people. I’d wake him up at 5:30, feed him, get to the arena as soon as it opened at 5:55, help him dress, lace up his skates and join him on the ice for twenty minutes till the game started. We’d pass and shoot, or play one on one. Sometimes we’d just hack around and bash into each other. I looked forward to it all week.

I’d become a Hockey Dad, thereby perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in Canadian hockey history. I knew nothing–really nothing–about coaching or playing organized hockey.

I grew up in Montreal, on the heels of the great Maurice Richard—era Canadiens dynasty and at the beginning of the Scotty Bowman squads of the ’70s. That, however, didn’t help my game a whole lot. I played one season of house-league hockey at Montreal West Arena in 1969, when I was eight. I’d grown two inches the previous summer and my ankles were like rubber. I was a sensitive child who tended to cry a lot. The kid next door told me I was weak, and I believed him. I think I spent quite a lot of time on the bench, but I’m not sure even about that. The only memory I have of the entire season is of standing alone on my ankles in my own end, my feet splayed out, hoping the play would stay on the other side of the rink.

I said I didn’t like hockey. My parents were relieved to have their Saturdays back, and the next winter they signed us all up for ski lessons. That was that.

I still owned skates, though, and sometimes I goofed around on the outdoor rink, but not very often. For an anglophone Montrealer in the 1970s, playing hockey turned out to be like speaking French. Everyone assumed you could, but you didn’t really need to.

So, I went to public skating at the arena on Friday nights with my gang of friends, and didn’t notice that because we always went counter-clockwise, I never learned to turn right. I played hours of ball hockey on the driveway, imagining myself outhustling, outshooting and flat-out flattening the current stars of the game, never noticing that banging a tennis ball into the net wasn’t teaching me how to shoot. I watched hours of hockey on TV, not noticing that watching the Habs win year after year hadn’t taught me anything at all about how the game was won.

From the Hardcover edition.