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

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There were many times when the surface of the entire lake was frozen over, and a skate to Big Bay Point and even to Orillia was enjoyed. On one occasion, however, I had the pleasure of being one of a crowd of half-a-dozen couples who, one moonlit night, skated from in front of Barrie station down past Big Bay Point, across a corner of Lake Simcoe to the mouth of the Holland River and up the river to the railroad bridge, half a mile or so south of the Bradford station, and returning on the midnight train, which at that time was the transcontinental one.

It would never do at this late date to mention the girls’ names, as some of them are grandmothers now, and besides, we had no chaperone on the trip.

From such a daily engagement with winter on a daily basis, conditions began to change significantly for Canadians in the last part of that century. The growth of large-scale industry and manufacturing in urban centres occurred alongside the associated termination of smaller operations in rural towns. Fixed-link transportation afforded by trains contributed to the centralization of many cultural and sporting activities once distributed over a wider geographic region, while waterfront industries powered by steam power, made big city living an economic powerhouse in which people with higher incomes could purchase consumer goods unimaginable a generation before. The daily press, the department store, theatres, and commercial sports made the city a destination for increasing numbers of rural dwellers.