Embracing winter in Toronto
The loosely organized fun that results when strangers play shinny is very liberating
Maybe you used to play hockey, and miss it, but haven’t laced up your skates in years. Maybe you’ve always wanted to play, but never really got the chance. Maybe you still play often, but are hungry for more ice time. Or maybe you don’t even know if you’d want to play hockey, but you’d like to try it and haven’t because the price and logistics of getting the equipment and arena time and teammates together seem forbidding.
Here’s what I suggest you do: go to a local park in Toronto and play shinny. It’s easy. It’s free. And I think it’s got a kind of urban magic in it.
This weekend past, most of the city’s free outdoor rinks opened for the season — the remaining rinks open Saturday — inaugurating another year of a great outdoor tradition.
When you go, ideally it’s a clear day where the temperature is hovering around zero — not so cold your toes will freeze but cold enough that the ice won’t get soupy. When you arrive and lace up your skates on a bench beside the rink, there may be an assortment of players on the ice: hotshot teenagers firing pucks against the boards; parents with school-aged chil- dren stepping tentatively; middle-aged men and women working the creaks out of their knees as they stickhandle around. At some point after you join them, everyone will throw their sticks into the circle at centre ice. Someone will sort the sticks into two piles, deciding the teams, and then the game starts, a free-flowing group improv dedicated to keeping the puck moving and having fun.
House rules develop in the moment by mutual agreement: since there are no goalies, sometimes you need to hit the post or bounce a shot off the boards to score; often people will suggest a minimum of three passes before a shot on net; allowances are quietly and naturally made to allow weaker skaters an opportunity to make a play. Latecomers are assigned a team with a simple gesture, and the play goes on and on, until everyone decides they’ve had enough. And then another game, with new players, starts shortly thereafter.
There’s no referee, no scorekeeper, no contact or fighting. There is no charge, and no registration is required. And on the ice, for a while, there are no worries. Just the cold air in your nose even as you work up a sweat, the crunch of the ice under your skates, the weight of the puck on your stick as you streak up along the wing toward the net.
Just joy, in other words.
When I first went out to the park near my house one night five or six years ago after the kids were in bed, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I was just seeing if I could scratch an itch. I had played league hockey as a child and as a young man, but hadn’t been on skates in more than a decade. What I found filled the hockey-sized hole in my life, for sure.
But the joy I found in outdoor park shinny goes a bit deeper than rediscovering the joy of a game. It was also reintroducing myself to the joy of being part of a spontaneous, self-organizing, temporary game community.
When you’re a kid, there are a bunch of situations — the schoolyard, summer camp, the playground — where you find yourself with a bunch of other people you may or may not know, and you quickly organize a way to have fun together. For a few years of your life, you might encounter this situation several times a day — there’s recess, and an after-school playground visit, and the kids’ corner at whatever party your parents drag you out to and so on.
But how often do we do find ourselves doing this as adults? We’re in lots of situations with strangers or near-strangers — in restaurants, on subway trains, at the grocery store — but for the most part we keep to ourselves and interact with each other as little as possible, or we’re there for a heavily programmed (and often invitation-only) purpose. At the shinny rink, you just play with whoever happens to be there.
I know there are musicians who sometimes go out to open jam sessions who may regularly experience something similar. But the opportunity to come together momentarily to have fun — to make fun — with other people is sufficiently rare and fleeting in adult life as to seem remarkable.
Remarkable, but commonly available. Toronto has 51 outdoor public rinks, more than any other city in the world. Most everyone in Toronto lives within a short walk or drive of a rink. Admission is free, and games are beginning and continuing and ending almost all the time.
All you need to do is show up and play. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire