Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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There’s a lot of ill-informed commentary about our shared experience of snow and cold somehow making us a hardier, more resilient, and tougher people. It just may be an opposite impact, however, that makes winter so prominent in our history and attitude toward others.

Weather, in this case winter, humbles us with its power and its indifference to our fate. We tamper with it at our peril.

Sports are the means Canadians use to fight back against the harsh reality of the season that informs so many metaphors of decline and death. In sports we triumph or find honour in participation.

From the days Canadians discovered in snowshoeing a sporting element and surrounded it with group songs and mixed hikes, to the steely resolve of curlers on mid-winter outdoor rinks, fortified by their whisky and haggis, and finally to the present day in which youngsters and their parents wake early in the cold and dark for 5:00 a.m. hockey practices, sports isn’t just the way we survive winter, it’s the way we revel in its opportunities.