Well. We’re going to Canada.
November 30th to December 8th, if you want the specifics, and I can tell you exactly what we’ll be doing with that time: watching the Washington Capitals play three games. Edmonton. Calgary. Vancouver. In that order. In December. In Canada.
Now, before anyone says anything, I want to be very clear about something.
This is research.
I am a working author. I write hockey romance under the Bella Bruce name — an entire fictional league, the Portland Pioneers, a whole universe of men who are enormous and emotionally constipated and skate very fast. You cannot write that convincingly from a stationhouse in rural Tasmania on the strength of YouTube highlights and vibes alone. At some point, a serious professional has to go and stand in the building. Feel the cold come off the ice. Hear what twenty thousand people sound like when the puck goes in. Learn what the air smells like at a rink in an actual hockey country in actual winter.
That’s not a holiday. That’s fieldwork. I’ll be taking notes. There will be notes.
(Jo has been very supportive about the notes. Jo has also been laughing at me for approximately three weeks. Both things can be true.)
Why now
Because Ovi re-signed.
For those of you who don’t follow hockey and are only here for the cats and the kitchen renovation: Alex Ovechkin is the Washington Capitals’ captain, the greatest goal scorer the sport has ever produced, and — at the time of writing — a man of forty who has just put pen to paper for a twenty-second season with the only club he’s ever played for. He’d left it late. There was a genuine possibility he’d simply walk away, and honestly, nobody would have blamed him.
He didn’t. He signed. “I’m back!” he said, which is exactly the correct number of words.
And the moment that news landed, we looked at each other and said: right. Now. It’s now or it’s never. Because the thing about watching a legend play out the last of it is that there’s no schedule for when the last of it arrives. You don’t get a warning. You get one more year, maybe, and then one day you’re reading a retirement announcement and thinking I always meant to go.
I have too many of those already. I wasn’t collecting another one.
The plan
Three games, three cities, nine days, and a schedule that is — I’ll be honest with you — mildly deranged. The Caps are on a long western road swing through that stretch, and we’ve essentially chosen to become barnacles on the hull of it. Edmonton, then Calgary, then Vancouver on the 7th, and then home.
Now about Snow…
And now I have to tell you something a little embarrassing, which is that neither of us has ever seen snow.
I mean properly seen it. Seen it falling and staying. Seen it sitting on things — on a fence post, on a car roof, on a branch — being snow, in the way it does in every Christmas film ever made.
We’ve seen the miniscule flurries you get here occasionally, the kind that come down looking very promising and then vanish the instant the sun clears the hill, like they’ve remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. And I once saw snow in Oregon, in spring, which I’d been quite excited about until I got close enough to establish that it was really more ice than snow — a sort of grey, granular, week-old business that had clearly given up on being beautiful some time ago.
That’s it. That’s the whole of my snow experience. Forty-odd years on this earth and I have never once stood in falling snow.
So somewhere in Edmonton or Calgary — and everyone assures me it’s a fairly safe bet in December — there is a very strong chance that two grown Tasmanian women are going to stop dead in the middle of a footpath, in the way of everybody, and simply stare upward with their mouths open like a pair of absolute tourists.
I’m not going to apologise for it. I’ve been waiting a long time. If you’re Canadian and you see us doing it, please just go around.
I am also told that Edmonton in early December is not cold in the way that we understand cold. Tasmanian cold is a damp, complaining sort of cold that gets into your knees. Edmonton cold, from what I gather, is a cold with opinions. A cold that takes an interest in you personally. We’re buying proper coats — real ones, not the optimistic Tasmanian approximation of a winter coat — and this has been budgeted for. It’s a business expense, obviously, because it’s research.
And the history
Because it can’t only be hockey — even I have limits, and Jo has conditions — we’re building the rest of the trip around actually seeing where we are. Museums. Old buildings. The bits of a country that tell you how it got to be the way it is. I’m the woman who once climbed a hill in New Zealand to stand where a film set used to be, so you already know I’m not going to be in Alberta and not go looking for what’s underneath it.
There’ll be a fair bit of that. There’ll be photographs. Given my track record with a certain tour group and twelve thousand photos of a fictional village, you should probably brace yourselves.
The honest bit
Here’s the truth of it, under all the joking about research.
I’ve been writing about this sport for years. I’ve built a league, filled it with players, given them lines and rivalries and terrible haircuts and love stories. And in all that time I’ve never once sat in a rink in the country that invented the thing and watched it happen in front of me.
That’s a gap. Not a fatal one — you can write around a gap — but I’ve always known it was there, sitting in the back of my head every time I described the sound of a body hitting the boards and had to imagine it.
So yes, it’s research. It’s genuinely research. It’s also nine days with my favourite person, in a country neither of us has seen, watching a forty-year-old Russian do the thing he’s better at than anyone who has ever lived, while there’s still time to watch him do it.
And somewhere in the middle of it, if the weather is kind — and by kind I mean appropriately unkind — I’m going to stand outside in a proper coat and watch snow come down and settle on things, for the first time in my life, at the age of far-too-old-to-be-this-excited.
Some research you have to go and get in person.
See you in December. I’ll bring back notes. And photos. So many photos.
— Suzy
thestationhousenotebook 