A touching story of friendship at the ice rink
Gordon Gibb’s new book was nearly two decades in the making
A Peterborough author has penned a heartwarming story of friendship, community and the life of the Canadian ice rink through the eyes of two friends.
Gordon Gibb, a radio personality with 100.5 Fresh Radio and author, said his experience writing the book “The Fifth Season” started in 2001, when he strapped on his ice skates one early winter morning.
“I’d gone out at the crack of dawn one day with my skates. It was a really nice morning, it was still, there was no wind, I had the place to myself. The ice had just been flooded, I thought I’ll just go out there,” Gibb said.
Gibb, who is an avid skater, said that was when the inspiration for his book came to him.
“Here is an outdoor ice rink, it is such a part of our Canadian culture and heritage. What if I could turn this into a character?” he said.
“What stories would it have, if it was capable of telling stories, like a central character? So that’s where it started, and I had to figure out how I would create a character out of the rink and make it work.”
Gibb tells the rink’s story through the narrative of characters Tim and Simon, both eight-year-olds and best friends, who live next door to each other.
“I needed someone to be the focal point of the story and someone to narrate the story,” he said. “I toyed with the possibility of using the rink as a narrator, that wasn’t going to fly because the rink would be in the story too much.”
“I found another way of including the rink, but I needed to narrate the story in the first person. So I came up with Tim.”
He said that’s when he also created the character of Simon, who is a child with Down syndrome.
It was a homage to all the great people with Down syndrome who have done so well in their chosen fields, he said.
Gibb, who is also the announcer for OHL Peterborough Petes games, drew inspiration from
Joey Moss, the longtime lockerroom attendant for the Edmonton Oilers and Edmonton Eskimos, who recently died at the age of 57 and had Down syndrome.
“I wanted to showcase these kids who were misunderstood and written off as institutionalized decades ago, when in fact they can be contributing members of society,” he said.
“That is the story I wanted to tell, and I told it through the eyes of both Tim and Simon.”
The themes of Canadiana and winter run throughout the entire story, since it is set in the north, he said.
“It is just about growing up in a simpler time where you came home from school and grabbed your skates and you went out into the backyard for a skate and played hockey,” he said.
“(Where) you spent your time outside, I wanted to capture the traditional feel of a traditional Canadian winter.”
It starts in the 1950s, long before electronic devices took over and when even television was an afterthought, meant for rainy days, he said.
“The location is fictitious, but it is a community that would very much remind people of Peterborough,” Gibb said.
“It is tight-knit, it is not a big city, it has a small town feel to it, everybody knows everybody, especially in the neighbourhood.”
Gibb said he was relieved when he had finally finished the book, because it had been a work in progress for almost two decades. He wrote the first draft in his spare time in 2001, he said. “I would get up at the crack of dawn with a cup of coffee and my old laptop and bang away on it,” he said.
“It has been a long time coming, I produced the third draft of it by Christmas of 2002. It has been that long; I wrote the first draft fairly quickly and it has taken years.”