Issue Eleven

 
   –They systematically push long, straight lines of powder and slush to the edge, back and forth, like a mower cutting his lawn.  Though it is below zero, the children have already flung their jackets down; their cheeks are flushed.  They are pink cherubs who have landed for a time on this pond, on this morning.

    It begins with a pond.  In the dead of, say, January.  Ice encrusted birch branches bow along its shores scraping and sweeping the surface with every gust of wind.  The neighbors hunker inside on this early Sunday morning, but the skaters, five or six children of various ages and sizes, are already out shoveling the snow off of the pond.
    Once the pond is clear, the children sit down on boulders and logs.  Their parents kneel before them and lace up their skates.  From a distance, this tableau looks like a medieval woodcut depicting a community of devout worshippers.  But down on the surface, in the muck of the process, it is a painful ceremony.  The cold numbs a mother’s hands.  Her fingers grow clumsy trying to pinch the end of the laces through the narrow eyelets.  The ice and snow sting and get into the children’s socks.  Their feet wiggle in anticipation; the lacing becomes even more difficult.  The parents tell them to calm down, wait a minute, mutter under their breath, and finally settle for a loosely tied knot.  Once the skates are finally laced, each child bursts up and out and flies off across the ice like flapping birds just released from a caged bondage.  The crisp sound of the skates scraping against the still, cold morning air, cutting into and across the pond is lapidary not only because of the literal inscriptions of the blades on ice but also because their scratches and swooshes produce a sonic memory in me as I watch.  It is an antique sound from another time, full of confidence and tradition and ritual and freedom.
    I can’t skate and so young skaters amaze me.  I can only imagine their experience.  But skating with any kind of speed and momentum must feel like flying.  No sport produces the heightened and almost manic sense of anticipation in children than the ritualistic lacing up of the skates before a hockey practice or game.  There is a fair amount of squirming on a little league baseball bench and pacing on the sidelines of a basketball game and running around before a soccer contest.  Go into a micron hockey locker room before a game, and  you will find a bunch of six year olds coiled to take off.  They bound out of the door and smash up against the gate to the rink, pushing and shoving to be the first in line.  Their pads make them think they are invincible and impervious to injury.  As soon as the Zamboni smoothes the ice, the little skaters seem to eject onto the rink.  They land and race around the perimeter over and over, circle within concentric circle.  I witness sheer joy in those tiny faces hidden behind their mesh wire masks.
    I look for that same joy standing with the Buffalo Sabres, of the National Hockey League, as they line up to take the ice for the first time in a year.  It is the night of the return of NHL hockey to Buffalo after a long lay off due to a players’ strike.  With the width they gain from their pads and the height they gain from their skates, the players become giants.  A troop of bagpipers and drummers leads them out onto the ice.  If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that these boys were trudging off to war in some far-flung British colony.  As the players come marching down the corridor, you see only grim determination on their faces.  I look for the boy flying on skates in each of them, but one after the other passes before us in silent concentration.  Their cheeks are pale; their eyes are tired and ringed a bit with red.  Outside, you can hear the sound system blaring the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” and the spectators screaming and pounding their feet.  Once the bagpipers enter the arena, it is suddenly quiet in the hallway.  All you hear is the swish of nylon hockey shorts and the click clack of the skates as the players make their way to the gate.  Finally, near the end of the line, Martin Biron, the young goalie, says, “Here we go,” and then their boyish captain, Daniel Briere, heading up the rear, turns and smiles and says hello as he recognizes the Sabres’ photographer.  In that smile, I finally see the joy and excitement at the prospect of flying once again.
    Fast, emotional, propulsive, a game of interlocking and winding circles that torque tighter and tighter as the shift progresses, hockey is a dangerous sport, which may explain some of the intensity in the players’ eyes.
    The patron saint of skaters, Lidwina of Schiedam, is not coincidentally also the patron saint of prolonged suffering and sickness.  She can be represented by a girl falling on ice as well as by an injured girl receiving a bunch of roses from an angel.  Saint Lidwina was born in Schiedam, Holland on April 18, 1380.  When she was 15 she spent an afternoon skating with her friends.  One of them bumped into her (checked her, perhaps?) and she fell and broke a rib.  She received poor medical care and gangrene set in, which eventually, so the story goes, covered her entire body.  Lidwina lay in such constant pain that some
in Schiedam believed she had become possessed.  For the rest of her life, she suffered without relief, but she was also comforted with continual visions of God.  Soon, those who came to her bedside were rewarded with miracles and her fame spread.  When she died, at the age of 53, people made pilgrimages to her grave.  Famous theologians eulogized her, and finally, in 1434, a chapel was built over it in her honor.  In 1890, Pope Leo XIII beatified her.
    I doubt many hockey players think of Saint Ludwina when they prepare to play, though George Plimpton did dedicate his hockey book, Open Net, to her.  Plimpton did not so much see a metaphor in Ludwina as a kindred spirit because Plimpton was always falling down when he skated.  I do strain for the reach of Ludwina’s symbolism as it pertains to hockey except as an obvious warning the kids hear over and over again from their coaches to wear their mouth guards and strap on their helmets.  In contrast, Saint Ludwina teaches the healing power of egolessness even in the face of great, personal suffering.  Pain usually turns the individual inward.  Ludwina’s pain made her even more compassionate.  I’ve never known organized hockey to teach, at least purposefully, such a profound moral or theological message.
    But the game–as boys and girls and men and women play it and as its true fans worship it–does promote a kind of selflessness within its intensity.  At least, I’ve witnessed a temporary escape from the self among some fans and players.  If you climb to the upper levels (the 300 section) of HSBC Arena, where the Sabres play their home games, you will find the true devotees
of the game.  The lower levels, with their more expensive seats and affluent clientele, carry the aura of a cocktail party.  There is just more chatting and meeting and greeting and less actual game watching in the 100 and 200 levels.  Upstairs, in the cheap seats, the fans are just as quiet and intense as the players were when they lined up before the game.  Their bodies are hunched forward in study like medical students in a surgical amphitheater.  The 300 level fans interpret the game as it unfolds, comment and criticize and sometimes chant.  The discourse of the 300 level spectators is a mixture of history, speculation, reverence, drunken song, and lamentation.  There is poetry up here–a post-modern mix of fact, fantasy, verse and aphorism.  Amidst the prolonged periods of silent observation, one man behind me screams over and over again, in a low bellowing voice, imploring the players to: “Put the nail in the coffin.  Put the nail in the coffin.  Put the nail in the coffin.” I think: “Can he possibly be referring to Saint Ludwina’s suffering on the ice?  Can he be invoking her sacred mixture of redemption and misery?”
    These fans seem to know instinctively that hockey is as much about blood and pain and broken bones and teeth and the muscular burn of extreme physical effort as it is about beauty and grace and transcendence.  Hockey probably reflects the contradictions of their own lives more accurately than the lawyers, surgeons and advertising executives in the lower sections.  When you think about it, skating is ironic.   You should be slipping, but instead you are gripping.  You should be falling, but instead you are flying.  You really shouldn’t be playing on a surface like a frozen pond, but instead you have mastered it and, as a hockey player, you are probably surer of your footing on ice than you are on solid ground.  Still, the slippery reminder of the fickle nature of existence is always there–you are always in danger of slipping and falling.  Saint Ludwina, like many saints, is ironic too.  Engrossed in physical suffering, she discovered the purely spiritual.  Wrapped up in her own body’s intense pain, she helped others. 
    From the 300 section, you see the irony of hockey.  At this distance, you do not hear the thud of checks or the grunts and swears of the players.  Instead, you see an Etch-A-Sketch of gyrating lines.  In a Charles Baxter novel, a physicist describes the play of snow as a “pattern of swirls, the visible vectors.”  That’s exactly what you see up here.  You realize that this is the only professional sport not played in a square or a rectangle.  Hockey is a circular game.  We may talk about digging the puck out of the corner, but there are no corners in a hockey rink.  It is an oval decorated with a series of circles.  To clear the puck from deep within your zone, the defenseman seeks to ricochet it around the bends in the boards as if he were a flipper in a massive pinball game.  The puck itself is a sphere spinning and orbiting throughout the contest.  The paths of the players circulate.  Their blades cut eddies within whirls.  Even the beloved Zamboni, which announces the intermissions between the three acts of the hockey performance, is blunted and rounded.  This is a game of circles within circles, a top twisting and spinning.  Hockey, viewed from up high, displays a geometry that is more spiritual and dynamic than the simplistic, two-dimensional line segments of a football field or the perfect angles of a baseball diamond. 
    And this is where, I think, Saint Ludwina and the game of hockey intersect, for the circle is a common figure of religious expression.  Hockey and the Ludwina story both place tremendous physical duress within a context of eternity.  Emerson says, in his essay, Circles, “The Eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.  It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.  Saint Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”  The very playing surface of a hockey rink beckons infinity.  Though “Circles” is ostensibly about writing and what it means to be a writer, Emerson could have been writing about hockey as when he says: “...every action admits of being outdone.  Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” If every slap of the puck is an action, it is an action waiting to be outdone by an opposing slap and so on.  This progress of the puck being continually outdone describes the narrative thread of any hockey game.
    Look at the portraits of the Sabre players printed here.  They are not just representations of men who skate for a living; they are pictures of men who have lived their life since the time they were little children in a circle, etching figure eights, swirl upon swirl, without end.  If the first circle is the eye, then stare at their eyes and then pull back to a far shot of the rink, to the red dot at center ice, to the face-off circles, to the puck and its journey throughout the game, and then to the oval arena and then beyond and above it to the moon and the midnight stars.  I do believe, that at some unconscious level, a life spent in circles within circles must exert some mystical pull on the soul.  I can’t prove this, but this I do know: Players over a lifetime at least get into the rhythm of hockey, and, even long after they stop playing for town travel leagues and they are cut from their college teams, they still rise before dawn on a Sunday morning, lace up their toddler’s skates and shovel a pond so that another generation of circles can be cut.