He was huddled under a patch of tufts, motionless a meter away, with this blind confidence in the effectiveness of his genetically programmed camouflage, a little more and we would step on him. The snow cover had melted over the previous days, leaving only a few grayish patches clinging here and there to the frozen mud and yellow grass. And this hare which, white since mid-November, formed, five days after Christmas, a clearly visible stain in the ochres and gray-browns of the undergrowth, did not seem to understand that he now had a problem.
Such a gap, in a living being, between its perception of its environment and the realities of the landscape and climate, between its feeling of security and the objective situation, left me, as always, a little dreamy, awakening my fiber as a certified producer of metaphors. . What or who could this food game betrayed by nature be the symbol of?
From the above-reproachable citizen, with a snow-white conscience in his air-conditioned SUV speeding at full throttle in the middle of an increasingly dark world? Are we all just the blind spot of our own consciousness?
In any case, if this December 29 on the bare earth was undoubtedly extremely favorable for hare hunting, and if the gymnasiums would soon be enriched with a new batch of self-flagellants, winter sports, at this end year, had indeed been put into penance. Even snowmobilers found themselves complaining on the radio, not about being prevented from enjoying the benefits of the Quebec winter, but about not being able to pour the traditional millions of dollars in benefits generated by their wake of blue gasoline into the economy of the regions.
Maybe we simply need to review our conception of winter sports, I said to myself, thinking of the skis and snowshoes that had not yet left the shed, and also of the Chinese who, in 2022, will be able to organize Winter Olympics in a setting as devoid of the slightest trace of natural snowflakes as, say, the surroundings of Wadi Mehaïguene.
On Saturday, I resumed jogging as usual. Back on my street, I saw, from a distance, the hockey net that my children had just dragged across the icy road. And in front of which I soon found myself, in boots, with real goalie pads and the appropriate stick, gloved with the mitt and the “biscuit”, but without a mask due to my big head, and I am no longer me, I am Marc-André Fleury, Flower for short, the veteran who still has a few good parts in his body.
I like street hockey, this citizen appropriation of a municipal road. I relish the forced slowdown it causes in local traffic. In front of the cars of the tough guys who approach a little too quickly, I stand in front of our enclave like the Larry Robinson of the good old days.
The next day we were out in the street again, this time to fight a quarter of touch football with family. You would never believe it to hear the sophisticated analyses, with tons of statistics and calculations worthy of NASA experts in support, from the commentary teams of the major American channels, but football, at its core, remains a relatively uncomplicated sport.
A smuggler monitored by a boat counter spy, a catcher and her roofer, simple routes, and that’s it. With the typical nuclear family and its 1.61 child, you can make two teams, and nothing matches the satisfaction that comes from a strategic block executed according to the rules of the art when it’s your ten year old daughter who benefits from it to race to the end zone. Our “NFL-approved” ball cost us, if I remember correctly, something like $28. Our sport played in very ordinary winter coats therefore costs us 200 times less than the all-inclusive for four in Cancun.
The snow finally arrived, very slowly, in thin daily layers accumulated, and I found myself sitting on an old beat-up three-ski in the slope of the schoolyard chasing imaginary “world sledding records” with the kid. The flakes had deserted the blue sky, the fresh snow shone under the pale sun and I had the impression of breathing the very spirit of winter.
Two days later, another game of boot hockey on our end of the street. Another family jumped onto the asphalt, we now had parity in gender identity: three males and three females, and the girls were so good, so pugnacious on defense, so aggressive on the forecheck, so venomous to the mouth of the cage and so patrick-royales in front of the goal that we would have thought we were in an episode of First trio.
Six people sportingly occupying the street, handling the bucket and chasing the little orange ball, in a demonstration of force such that, in these mobile stands that the cars parading in slow motion became, the motorists now saluted us with a thumbs up.
Obviously, with our games of touch football at the park, our old hockey sticks sometimes bent the wrong way and our plastic saucers several years old and purchased at Canadian Tire, we perhaps do not contribute as much as others to fattening our flourishing industry of specialized outdoor equipment. From the point of view of advanced technology, our patriotism leaves something to be desired.
But for what would Kane, the press magnate imagined by Orson Welles, have, on the verge of death, without hesitation, exchanged all his billions? The child’s sled… To each their own Rosebud.
“To the north your father and your mother”, says the Christian commandment rewritten by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu of World Race ! To return to winter, just shake the snow globe from childhood.