About mid-December, the ground got too hard (frozen) to be tackled on and the golf courses were closed for the winter. Snows like the one pictured above made it possible to hunt during the week because school was cancelled because the buses couldn’t get through the roads until they had been plowed. That meant half the student body couldn’t get to class! Loved snow days! One other thing we did on those days later in the winter was ice fish. There were enough lakes, ponds, and gravel pits in the area that we could drive down a plowed road to one or more of them and fish through the ice. Caught mostly smaller pan fish but once in a while we’d catch something big enough to fry.
Once the ground was truly frozen, then that baseball diamond turned football field was transformed again. This time, into a hockey rink! Most of the neighborhood guys, the ones that played baseball and football in that backyard, gathered at the house at about 8:00 pm to do our homework and take turns in the back yard using a garden hose to water what would be our hockey rink the next afternoon after school.
The first year or two, the backyard wasn’t very level and there was one corner of that yard that was much higher than the rest. It took a lot longer and a lot more water to get a good thickness of ice there until the home owner paid someone to level that area. At any rate, the ice was never more than an inch thick at the high areas. Before that we never had the patience to water at night and not play the next day, so we were usually cutting through to the dirt before it got too dark to play any more that day. We would gather again at 8:00 pm and start the watering again. We usually took 20 to 30 minute shifts with plastic bags on our gloves to help keep our hands from freezing when watering and then retreated to the house to warm up with hot chocolate and popcorn before tackling our home work for an hour before it was our watering shift again.
When possible, like on weekends, we’d get together and find transportation to a local lake or pond with all our hockey equipment (usually just shin guards, hockey sticks, and a puck) and snow shovels. Most of the time, we had to clear the ice of snow or the previous days ice shaving before we could play. Word of the game would get around or it was just common knowledge that there would be players as long as there was ice. Players would trickle in as others would leave. Games lasted most of the day. Of course, it was dark by 5:00 pm and nobody wants to find a black, frozen hockey puck screaming at them in the dark! Game over!
Hockey season never lasted long. Our weather was too unpredictable. We’d have a month to six weeks of really cold nights and then the days would warm up to around 40 degrees and melt all our efforts away. The ground would soften and the water would soak in leaving just grass and mud. Even the lakes and ponds would have puddles of water on them, not to mention the danger of falling through the ice. It might get cold again, but it wouldn’t last and winter would soon change into spring.