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

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Adventurous baby boomers who came of age as teenagers in the 1960s discovered there was more to life than their stereotyped existence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll by popularizing entirely new recreations like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Less frantic members of this age group opted for cross-country skiing, which enjoyed an extraordinary boom in the 1970s.

Within a few years a society that had only recently rejected the playing wishes of young girls like Abby Hoffman had been completely transformed. By the 1990s organized women’s hockey was flourishing.

For those who thought they had left that part of their lives behind, senior men’s hockey challenged the already overstretched schedules of local hockey rinks. When some of their fellow players succumbed to heart attacks on ice, their friends rationalized that at least they died doing something they liked, and then kept right on playing, their own mortality hanging in some cases by the same fragile encounter with full time.

The growth of year-round lifestyle communities in places like Whistler, British Columbia, or Collingwood, Ontario, completed the re-entry of winter into the lives of Canadians, though its residents must have sufficient resources to live there. It is the enjoyment of the lifestyle associated with those places, which ironically is now part of the larger dilemma we face in ensuring the continuance of future winter conditions.