Where Winter Begins

At a sports park dedicated to snow and ice, generations of Petoskeyites have formed a love of winter that endures and defines them.

- James McCullough

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

At Petoskey’s Sheridan Elementary not long ago, I told the young writers in Mrs. Hintz’s fifth grade classroom that I too had a writing assignment. “It’s about the Winter Sports Park,” I said. Immediately, hands shot up across the room telling me how they had skated, skied, or sledded through the washboard bumps, crashing into each other at the bottom, how they played hockey, or slid out of bounds down the steep, fenced-off dune we called “Suicide” when I was a boy.

Suddenly I recalled buried memories of my early youth in ski school with the neighborhood dads, in the final days of wood-core skis with screw-in edges, Cubco and “bear-trap” bindings attached to lace-up boots, and of middle school, the evening I had schussed through the narrow gap between the rope tow and the pines just to impress Jeanie, the girl who later would give me my first kiss.

Such is the power of a place to summon from us memories of our youths, and I imagined how decades from now, a return to the park might conjure from these children old memories of deep sledding snow or of the football field–sized ice rink, where girls and boys have learned for generations to twirl, speed skate, slap hockey pucks before games, and of course, celebrate the annual Winter Carnival.

But there is something deeper yet in all of this. In our youth, playing in the snow and on the ice establishes our affinity for winter, defines our northern identities. We become those who hazard and love the cold, who downhill and cross-country ski, ice fish, snowshoe, play outdoor hockey in ungodly temperatures, and do so with an unconscious pride and affection for the season, while others would gladly fly away south.