The river doesn’t freeze anymore; hasn’t done so in over ten years, as far as I can tell. But in the 1970s, when my kids were in high school, the area just out from the Nod Road canoe launch was the sight of many a pick-up ice hockey game.
Testing the thickness of the ice usually began just before Christmas. My rule to the kids was nothing less than twelve inches before skating out to the middle. There were still, at that time, trunks of trees that had grown up on the old river bank before the dam at the James River Paper Company in Pepperell raised the water level to its current height. When the ice formed and cracked around these trunks it was possible to see down into the depth of the ice without having to drill a hole to test the thickness.
The hockey games themselves were much like the softball games in the summer or the soccer games we played in back field in the fall. Some days there might be two or three on a side, other days as many as eight on a side. Everybody played; boys, girls, fourth graders to seniors in high school, with occasional adults who happened to be around. Adults who could not skate very well, like me, had to be goalies, just so we didn’t slip and fall on one of the smaller kids. Besides, it’s really embarrassing to have some tiny fourth-grade girl go sailing past your legs pushing a puck while you’re busy using your own stick to keep yourself upright.
We had no nets, so the goals were usually marked by three branches laid out on the ice in the dimensions of a proper goal. More often then not a slap shot at the goal would send the puck down the river twenty or thirty yards. And it was the goalie’s job to fetch it.
Even on the short days of winter, when the sun sank at four in the afternoon, I would take off work early and rush home to grab my skates and insert myself into a game the kids had started when they got home from school. I might only get to play for fifteen or twenty minutes before it became too dark, but what great fun it was.
There are two other memories I have of the ice that have nothing to do with hockey. I would invite friends out from the city just to skate downriver. It was possible to go to as far as hundred yards from the dam in Pepperell. And normally, if you stayed in the middle of the river there was never much snow on it. The only kind of fish that lived in the river in those days were carp and hornpout. Hundreds, or maybe thousands of gold carp survived in that water, most likely having bred from goldfish tossed in river. As you skated along in the center of the river where the ice was clear, the gold carp would swim along underneath you. You could see them under the ice, a school of them, exactly following your skates.
The other memory is the sound. The electric turbine in Pepperell that belonged to the paper mill would be shut down on the weekend when not in use. This would cause the height of the river to rise, as much as two to three feet over the weekend. The ice would rise with the height of the water and then, when the sluice for the turbine was opened again on Monday, the water would drop under it, creating a gap of the same depth. When the ice could no longer support itself above the empty space it would fall. And as it fell, it made the spookiest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. A deep bass “Waa-woom” would start upstream and then move downriver. “Waa-woom Waa-woom” down around the bend, so you could hear it receding away toward the dam.