The Home Ice Advantage

A skater since childhood, Jack Falla built in his Natick, Massachusetts, backyard a skating rink christened by friends the Bacon Street Omni (BSO). Its social dimensions, obeying some glacial Parkinson’s Law, soon expanded from the standard sixty-five feet by thirty feet to Waldenesque proportions. In this excerpt from Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds, the BSO plays to family and friends at ice level, and at another to meditation and metaphysical figure eights. As A. J. Leibling and Red Smith have shown, writing on sports precludes neither lucidity nor lyricism. Falla underscores the point.

By Jack Falla

Author’s Preface: My backyard skating rink is important because it connects me with people I love. Since I first built it seventeen winters ago, the rink has been a bridge to family and friends, a road back to the frozen ponds of my New England childhood, a lens through which I’ve watched my children and their friends grow up, and an arena wherein I’ve battled the encroachments of middle age. Middle age is winning.

“Shots in the Dark” is the second of the seventeen essays that make up the book Home Ice. I wrote “Shots” because I’d wondered why I often shoot pucks in my driveway the way other — should I say more normal — people go to their driveways to shoot basketballs or to their gyms to work out. The answer for me has more to do with getting through life than with staying in shape. — JF

Illustration: Dayna Elefant.

I understand it better now, but on the February morning when I was ten I remember thinking it was odd, probably irreverent — maybe even sinful — to be shooting a puck against a wall a few hours after my mother had died.

My mother lost what journalists tend to call “a long battle with cancer.” I thought of it more as a street fight — no rounds, no rules, no draws, and nobody to break it up. I thought she may have had the better of the kicking and scratching when she came home for Christmas and stayed with us until mid-January before going back to the hospital. But then came the phone call at about four in the morning and the visit from my aunt — my mother’s sister — to my room.

I was saddened by my loss, angry about my mother losing. As the rest of the morning disintegrated into a chaos of doorbells and phone calls, I escaped to the backyard.

It was bitterly cold and I noticed a small frozen puddle a few feet in front of the garage wall. Water had collected in a depression my friends and I had made by wearing away the turf in our touch football games. My parents didn’t mind some of my friends wearing cleats in the yard. I remember a friend’s mother asking my mother rather archly, as I would later learn some well-off suburban women like to talk, “You let these kids tear up your yard like that?”

“That’s what we bought it for,” my mother said.

I wandered into the garage and found my hockey stick — its straight blade held together by layers of black friction tape — and a puck encrusted with the calcified dirt of some now-forgotten driveway hockey game. I dropped the puck on the frozen puddle and started taking shots at the garage wall, toward an imaginary goal in front of which crouched an imaginary goalie. I didn’t have much of a shot. Still don’t. But I found intrinsic satisfaction and vague comfort in the act of shooting, of sweeping the puck forward and sending it where I wanted it to go. Whether I hit or missed, I controlled the stick, the puck, and all the variables. If I did everything right, I could control the outcome of the act in a way I could never control real life.

I don’t know how many shots I took that morning. Probably not many before cold, obligation, and guilt drove me back to the house. In the forty-plus years since, I’ve often gone outdoors to shoot pucks the way other people might go out to shoot basketballs. I do it for recreation and sometimes for escape.

Of course not all of my pucks have been pucks and not all of my goals have been goals. I’ve shot tennis balls, rolled-up socks, a wooden ball from a toy bowling game, rolls of tape, cans of tuna fish, Whiffle balls, chunks of ice, and pieces of wood. I’ve shot them at walls, closets, garage doors, beach chairs, bookcases, and — my all-time favorite — a fireplace screen. Even today I cannot see a fireplace screen in even the most elegantly appointed living room without thinking — “top corner.”

These days I have my own rink in my backyard and, on it, a regulation-size, steel-frame hockey goal. I shoot at it a lot in winter but, when the ice melts, I put the goal in the driveway for the kids. I rarely shoot at it there.

That goal sat on my driveway one August morning a few years ago when I was hit by what the late E. B. White of The New Yorker called “that end-of-summer-sadness our language has no word for.” It was a sadness made worse by loneliness. My wife, Barbara, was visiting friends in New Orleans, our son, Brian, was at work, earning money for his first year at boarding school, and our daughter, Tracey, was in Maine at a field hockey camp.

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