West Street Rink in Orillia during the 1880s.
The box of the commodious old sleigh had been filled a foot or so deep with straw, and robes and blankets galore provided when the weather was really cold and the driving snow bit into a fellow’s cheeks. But in the sleigh days and nights no one was afraid of blizzards. Having got out into the country, many times the roads were found impassable through the drifts and a shortcut would be taken through the fields, and lots of times was the snowfall so heavy that it covered up the rail fences, and when it didn’t as many of the top rails as necessary would be removed to allow a passage.
Later on we were old enough to pilot a single rig ourselves. They talk now of a motor spark plug, meaning a second-hand “tin lizzie” probably, but ask any of the old boys and they’ll tell you they had nothing on an old-fashioned horse and cutter outfit you could hire for two dollars for a whole afternoon or evening at Alex Fraser’s Livery.
Two wars and a depression didn’t kill the experience of winter, but did consign it to a place of less prominence in daily lives. It would take the return of a somewhat more stable peace after 1945, and the increasing affluence of this post–Second World War period to finally restart the great engine of winter sports.
At first it was youngsters playing hockey in an expanding network of minor hockey in the 1950s. However, it was an enthusiasm generally available only for boys, although one young girl named Abby Hoffman did make an improvised appearance on one of those gender-limiting teams before her eventual discovery.
There was the steady growth of a winter-sports industry for skiers and curlers in an expanding network of clubs and resorts. Once formerly limited to only the very wealthy, these sports now attracted a more egalitarian membership.
Adventurous baby boomers who came of age as teenagers in the 1960s discovered there was more to life than their stereotyped existence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll by popularizing entirely new recreations like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Less frantic members of this age group opted for cross-country skiing, which enjoyed an extraordinary boom in the 1970s.
Within a few years a society that had only recently rejected the playing wishes of young girls like Abby Hoffman had been completely transformed. By the 1990s organized women’s hockey was flourishing.
For those who thought they had left that part of their lives behind, senior men’s hockey challenged the already overstretched schedules of local hockey rinks. When some of their fellow players succumbed to heart attacks on ice, their friends rationalized that at least they died doing something they liked, and then kept right on playing, their own mortality hanging in some cases by the same fragile encounter with full time.
The growth of year-round lifestyle communities in places like Whistler, British Columbia, or Collingwood, Ontario, completed the re-entry of winter into the lives of Canadians, though its residents must have sufficient resources to live there. It is the enjoyment of the lifestyle associated with those places, which ironically is now part of the larger dilemma we face in ensuring the continuance of future winter conditions.
Hockey on frozen slough, east of Viking, Alberta, 1912.
Winter has now become more than a season. It is a window into the future. It is reflected on an almost daily basis in the glaciers and ice fields and snow-packed mountains and backyard rinks and even the permafrost in Arctic wilderness, and the penguins and polar bears that live in the dark and cold places of the world.
Climate change, once the topic of mild concern, and then intense debate, is now acknowledged to be an increasing threat to survival, or at least to our ability to live within reasonably tolerant levels of heat and frost.
How we deal with that challenge will define our place in the world for centuries, and along with that, a world in which winter is commonplace rather than a rare experience. Human willingness to confront this challenge is at least partly based on our ability to look back at what once so enflamed passions and created a distinct national identity.
It is easy to forget the glories of what once was, and instead take for granted as both inevitable and normal, our experience of the world today and into the future.
Winter, the “splendid season,” is more than just a time of year. It is the metaphor of who and what Canadians have been, are, and imagine themselves to be. Winning gold medals or owning the podium at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver would only be a shallow victory if Canadians accepted winter’s decline as a fact of life beyond their control.
TWO How Winter Has Shaped Canadian Identity from Literature to Art
What is a Canadian? It’s an open-ended question that inevitably generates as many answers as there are people considering it. Responses have changed over the years, as Canadian identity has shifted throughout the decades.
One of the more recent ways of describing a Canadian, however, is contrasting the differences between them and their influential neighbours directly to the south. If you continue that dialogue though, eventually and inevitably, the conversation reverts to a time-honoured self-identifier. Pressed hard enough, most will declare it is a Canadian’s relationship with winter. Snow, sleet, blinding blizzards, and ice are all symbols of the Canadian experience, and the telling images of who we are.
Winter is not simply one of four seasons to a Canadian. It’s not merely the time separating fall from the spring. It’s much more. Winter in Canada is a force. Its power has made Canadians who they are, in the same way the Declaration of Independence defines Americans and soccer-playing connotes the Brazilians. It’s what we’re known for whether we like it or not. Take winter away and would we still be Canadians? Perhaps our own self-image would adjust, but the rest of the world might have trouble responding to this lost cliché.
Robertson Davies claimed that “cold breeds caution,” suggesting not too subtly the relationship between the winter climate and the psyche of Canadians as a whole. Canada is in a winterized state for a major part of the calendar year. In certain areas of Canada, winter is extreme, debilitating, and fierce. The calendar definition of the season running from just before Christmas through late March is one of the more misleading markers. Davies argues that because of the cold climate Canadians are perhaps more cynical and paranoid. This receives added credence in the way it contributes to the Canadian desire to separate themselves from Americans.
The blending of American and Canadian cultures has become more pronounced in recent years. Canadians are offended by this development and rely on critical sustenance for their ability to differentiate themselves from Americans by virtue of being winter warriors.
This bond between Canada and winter is best described by French-Canadian singer Gilles Vigneault, who succinctly remarked, “My country’s not a country, it’s winter.” His country, however, was not necessarily Canada. It is symptomatic of the complex nature of Canadian identity that Vigneault is described as a poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and well-known Quebec nationalist and sovereignist.
So, no sooner do Canadians find an artist who expresses his people’s attitude to their relationship with winter then he disavows his interest in such an identity.
Still, Canadians wear this relationship between themselves and climate as a badge of honour. Canadians travelling abroad check into international hostels with maple leaves attached to their backpacks and proudly tell a traveller from Spain, “If I can take a Canadian winter, I can certainly rough it in this hostel.”
