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

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If everyone would content himself or herself with decorous straight-away skating everything would be satisfactory, but it would require the Arctic Ocean to give safe room for the scooting kids in a game of tag, and a bunch of girls doing a combined figure eight, while some fellow cut a swath the whole width of the pond with his outside edge, or spread-eagle, scissors or smoothing iron; and did you ever see a couple doing the double grapevine who turned out of their course for anyone?

But the most disastrous skating menace was the scorcher with humped shoulders who raced ahead until he met some struggling couple or an earnest exponent of some of the above stunts when there would be a heap of ruins.

Winter, however, was only a minor hindrance to daily employment in the industrial city. Work was no longer necessarily in one’s own neighbourhood and usually required travelling on crowded streetcars, or, if one was more fortunate, a poorly insulated private car. City streets required one’s personal labour to be cleared of snow, while icy hazards had to be avoided by wary pedestrians, such as broken bones from falls. Winter, in short, was increasingly a nuisance and not something to be embraced. Indeed for these early city “pioneers” there was likely less engagement in winter sports then for later generations of city dwellers.