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

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Winter has shaped Canada’s image and been embraced with hearty enthusiasm from snowshoeing hikers in the nineteenth century to future hockey stars on homemade rinks and to the indoor spectacle of figure-skating carnivals and curling bonspiels.

A Barrie women’s hockey team in 1897. Back row: Louise King, Mabel Lowe, Mrs. Ben Smith, Lucie Payne, Flo Brigham, May Graham; front row: Annie Graham, Amy Lowe, Ethel Urquhart.

Our literature, our songs, and our memories of youth all have their connection to winter’s refreshing tonic. Even as we curse ice-laden roads on the morning commute to work or watch with keen anticipation the Weather Channel’s daily prediction for our weekend ski trip, Canadians sense that somehow this bracing time of year is central to their very survival.

In Montreal, snowshoers of the nineteenth century sang their wish that winter could be nine months long, but alas, twenty-first-century winter’s diminishment to a weak reminder of its former glory is a real possibility as climate change wreaks long-term havoc. Winter means something for the sense of Canadian identity, and for the collective memory of the country’s heritage, nor should we forget those businesses and industries dependent on the “splendid season.”