Conclusion Return to the Moon

The alert reader will have noticed a few references to the moon in the chapters of this book. In chapter 5, I noted that Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” was published originally in a collection titled The Children of the Man in the Moon. Though the moon doesn’t appear directly in “The Hockey Sweater,” Carrier’s afterword to the second edition identifies the boy in the story—himself—as one of the children from the book’s title. His relationship to hockey is affected by this identity (Carrier 1983, 166). In chapter 5, on King Leary, Percival Leary first sees the round rink at the Bowmanville Reformatory under “a full moon” that is “silver like a nickel” (Quarrington 1994, 145). At his death, Leary rejoins “the circle” of monks on this rink under “the big silver moon” (232). And in chapter 13, on Indian Horse, Saul Indian Horse’s readiness to return to hockey is marked by the phases of the moon. The new moon of chapter 48 hints at his need to revisit Gods Lake, while the full moon of chapter 51 suggests his readiness. When Saul is ready to return, the moon becomes “the face of a drum” and then “the shining face of a rink” (Wagamese 2012, 206).

I was delighted to encounter these references. I can honestly say that I didn’t have them in mind when I chose my childhood fantasy as the organizing image for Hockey on the Moon. Their existence is a wonderful example of the vitality and unpredictability of the imagination.

The references themselves illustrate key aspects of the imaginative responses to hockey that this study has explored. In King Leary, the moon, in combination with the perfect circle of the monks’ rink, represents the idealism of the hockey myth. The moon, with its connection to the monks, links the “happy naturalism” in the myth to muscular Christianity—a belief system associated with hockey from its earliest days (as Ralph Connor’s Glengarry School Days, the focus of chapter 2, demonstrates). King Leary satirizes the virtues claimed for hockey by the myth, but the novel doesn’t dismiss these virtues outright: Leary’s wholeness at the end is signalled by his return to the round rink lit by the moon.

Indian Horse is harsher than King Leary in its treatment of the hockey myth but is also more optimistic, in the end, about hockey’s potential. Optimism is implied by the moon imagery. That the moon becomes first a drum and then a rink signals how Saul can reimagine the game to serve himself and his community. That the rink and the drum have “faces” reinforces the connection between self and other in this reimagining. We tend to attribute faces to objects and other creatures in whom we see a reflection of ourselves (as in the face of a clock). The moon imagery, then, reinforces how Saul’s embrace of “Indian hockey” is his way of caring for himself by caring for others. Saul’s decision to coach Indigenous children is a way to care for these children while also caring for the small child inside himself. Thus his return to Manitouwadge contributes to the ongoing vitality of that community while also representing a stage in his own recovery.

An important thing to stress about the end of Indian Horse is that the reimagined game is not a return to the “purity” implied by Saul’s original vision of the white ice at the residential school. Although he remembers the “white glory” of the rink when he warms up before the reimagined game, the original “white glory” is transformed by the needs of the present Indigenous community. The new game is not mythical but human. Remember that the line up of players for the opening face-off contains “five of the original Moose” but also “kids of assorted ages and sizes and young girls and older women” (Wagamese 2012, 221). What will follow the dropping of the puck in such a game will, needless to say, be messy—like life itself.

The Carrier reference is equally rich with implication. Carrier’s book title suggests that his boyhood belief in Maurice Richard was like his belief in the Man in the Moon. Growing up meant leaving these beliefs behind. The story of how he did this is found in Our Life with the Rocket. As I suggested in chapter 5, a key event for Carrier was the 1949 Asbestos Strike, when he discovered that all the parties to the strike were Montreal Canadiens fans. The strike taught him that hockey is not a timeless, mythical activity, but a passionate recreation that can be used by different people for different ends. This revised view of the game is paralleled with a revised view of Maurice Richard. In later life, Carrier realized that Richard was only a man, and that the Rocket as mythical hero was an imaginary creation, whose strength “belongs in the same category as that which drove Icarus to fly” (Carrier 2001, 258).

The power of myths—including the myth of hockey—is rooted in what limits them. Myths try to capture transhistorical truths, in the way that “The Hockey Song” tries to distill something like the essence of hockey. In seeking the transhistorical, however, myths obscure history (including the history that has made them). When the history obscured by a myth is made visible, disenchantment occurs. Sometimes this process is accompanied by disillusionment (a common synonym for “disenchantment”) but more often it just means that the myth is demystified, literally dis-enchanted, thus losing its magical aura. This is what happened when Carrier became aware of the history obscured by the myth of the Rocket.

It is important to stress that although Carrier outgrew his naïve belief in the Rocket, his boyhood identification with Maurice Richard served a valuable purpose. As he writes in Our Life with the Rocket, not only did the identification allow the small boy he was to feel bigger, but the Rocket provided an inspirational model that helped him and his friends to be “better men” (2001, 292). The persisting value of Carrier’s identification is rooted in the fundamental mechanism of myth and religion. In a sense, we are all always small children before the biggest challenges of life (especially the fact of death) and looking for ways to feel “bigger.” Remember the passage from Karen Armstrong I quoted back in chapter 1. According to Armstrong, humans have always craved stories that “enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value” (2006, 2). Growing up makes Carrier self-aware about how he used Richard in this way.

Carrier’s evolving relationship with the Rocket illustrates the different responses to hockey that are at the core of this study. As a boy, Carrier believed whole-heartedly in the Québécois version of the hockey myth—a classically conservative imaginative response. As he got older, his responses became more critical. These critical responses were not simply about rejecting earlier beliefs (although Carrier does subject some of his childhood beliefs to harsh criticism) but about understanding those beliefs in relation to the history from which they emerged. Out of this understanding comes new possibilities.

Finally, about Carrier’s title Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune. I have to say, I was particularly delighted when I discovered this title—and Carrier’s explanation for it. I am of the generation of Roch Carrier’s children. Like his daughters, I was raised in a more scientific time, a time in which humans built rockets to travel to the actual moon, thus putting paid to any beliefs about the moon being home to a balloon-headed man. But I am also a child of the Man in the Moon. Like Carrier, I remember looking up as a boy to see if I could make out the moon’s face. I probably did this while I watered my backyard rink. And, like Carrier, the search for this face stirred my imagination. I didn’t know then that the moon is often associated with the imagination itself. How apt this association now seems. The association is a reminder that imagination thrives in the half-light, in the movements between wholeness and newness, and recovery and loss, that are embodied by the moon. Moonlight is a time of transformation.

The texts I have explored in this study all represent hockey in the half-light of imagination. In so doing, they reveal patterns in the game, and various meanings and associations, that perhaps could not be revealed (or as well revealed) by other means. How much of what is revealed comes from qualities in the game itself and how much is a projection by the one who imagines can never be fully determined. What can be determined, however, is that the interaction of imaginative tendencies is a dynamic process. Each hockey game tells the same story—as Iz suggests in Twenty Miles—but the story of hockey is never fully told. Hockey—as Bob Bonaduce discovers in The Good Body—is like life itself: empty and full of possibility.