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

26 страница из 53

So while in bigger cities like Toronto or Montreal, and particularly the newer ones of Calgary and Edmonton, the countryside remained almost within a reasonable walking distance away, it was a place increasingly removed from most city dwellers’ daily experience.

Alongside this, the expectation of convenience associated with life in the city suggested to many that even a semblance of discomfort, such as that associated with outdoor winter activity, was something to be abandoned as a remnant of the past.

In Toronto, there would be one last winter to remember the season’s pleasures and its challenges before war and urbanization’s other demands consigned to memory this older, almost naive pleasure of the season. It occurred even as the seeds were being planted for winter’s eventual transition to its modern form as a commodity whose pleasure would increasingly be purchased either in the form of hockey equipment from CCM and Eaton’s, or weekend skiing getaways, at first to little hills north of the city, but gradually to more remote and expensive resorts.