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Chapter five

Eric

M ornings were my time to explore. The sun was bright in the aftermath of the storm.

I'd been wandering Ironhook for nearly a week, and my feet had developed their own sense of direction—today, they carried me north, away from the coastal path I'd been documenting, toward a section of the island I hadn't yet explored.

I pushed through a tangle of wild roses. I'd focused my research on the resilience of people in the face of economic forces beyond their control, but this morning, I turned things on their heads. I thought about how places held on sometimes, even after the people had moved on.

I spotted something unique through the undergrowth: a strange geometric curve that didn't belong to the natural landscape. It was chain-link fencing, I realized, as I fought my way closer.

It wasn't the practical kind you'd string around a garden. It was industrial-grade, twelve feet high, with concrete-anchored posts. The structure had mattered enough to build it properly.

I followed the fence line through blackberry canes and sumac saplings, pushing aside branches woven through the metal mesh. The vegetation grew thicker as I walked until I was tunneling through green walls that scraped against my camera bag and left burrs clinging to my sleeves.

Suddenly, the brush opened up. I stood at the edge of what had once been a hockey rink.

The surface was fractured asphalt now, split into irregular puzzle pieces by decades of frost heaves. Weeds erupted through every crack—goldenrod, purple asters, and scrappy birch saplings that managed to root themselves in spaces barely wide enough for their seeds.

The boards stood weathered but intact. Goal frames rose from the chaos like rusted monuments, their nets long since rotted away, leaving only skeletons. Orange rust bled down the posts in irregular streaks.

I walked the perimeter slowly, snapping a few Polaroid photos. Someone had carved initials into the boards—JM '89 in careful block letters, SARA + TOMMY 4EVER in a heart now partially obscured by moss, and something more recent in silver spray paint that the weather had rendered illegible.

Beneath a tangle of Virginia creeper, I saw bits of faded red paint. It was the center line, maybe, or the outline of a face-off circle. I crouched down and brushed away some leaf litter, revealing more.

I grinned, feeling like an archaeologist unearthing 20th-century objects.

A hockey puck sat half-buried next to a young birch tree that had sprouted directly through what must have been the blue line. The tree was maybe six feet tall now—old enough to suggest years of abandonment.

Click. My Polaroid spit out another image.

I moved methodically around the rink. Vines had colonized the goal frames. Wildflowers bloomed in the penalty box area.

Standing at what had been center ice, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the place in its prime. I heard the scrape of skates on fresh ice and the sharp sound of pucks meeting sticks.

I opened my eyes and pulled out my field notebook, balancing it against my knee as I wrote: This wasn't only a rink. It was a gathering place, the kind of space that made winter worth surviving.

The Polaroids finished developing as I walked back toward the cottage, their colors rich and slightly oversaturated. Each was evidence of an image of Ironhook I was only beginning to understand.

I tucked the photos into my jacket pocket, already wondering what Wes would make of them. And whether he'd ever skated on the rink.

I found Wes exactly where I'd left him that morning—settled into a wooden chair on his porch with a coffee mug cradled in both hands, watching the water. The sun had climbed higher while I'd been exploring, burning off the last wisps of fog and turning the harbor into a sheet of sparkling silver.

He glanced up as my boots hit the porch steps, taking in my grass-stained jeans and the camera still hanging around my neck. A few burrs clung to my jacket sleeve.

"Find something interesting?"

"Maybe." I settled onto the top step, close enough to share the photos but not so close as to crowd him.

I pulled the Polaroids from my jacket pocket. The top photo showed the full rink in the morning light, with overgrown goal frames centered in the composition. I handed it to him first.

The change in his expression was immediate.

His features rearranged into something more guarded. He stared at the photo, his thumb running along the white border.

I did my best to keep my voice light. "What was that place like back in the day?"

The silence stretched long enough to hear a gull cry somewhere out over the water, its call sharp and lonely. "The heyday ended before my time, but I have skated there."

I handed him the second photo—the close-up of the goal frame wrapped in vines—and watched his reaction. Everything about his posture suggested a man working hard to appear unaffected.

Pushing would be the wrong move. Instead, I tried a different approach—something that might open a door.

I began to tell my story. "I was a total disaster on skates until Ziggy dragged me onto the ice and held on to keep me from falling."

I settled back against the porch post. "This was back when we were ten, and I had somehow convinced myself that hockey was like riding a bike—something you could figure out through pure determination and a complete disregard for physics."

Wes glanced at me, and a flicker of curiosity broke through his composure.

"Ziggy had been skating since he could walk, so naturally, he assumed teaching me would be simple. Show up, strap on some skates, and let natural ability take over."

I grinned at the memory. "First thing I did was trip over my own stick and take out half the youth league practice. Kids went down like dominoes. The coach made me sit in the penalty box for the rest of the session, which was probably a public safety measure more than punishment."

The corner of Wes's mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was close enough to suggest I was heading in the right direction.

"Ziggy felt so bad he bought me a hot chocolate afterward and promised to teach me properly, even if it took all winter." I shook my head, still amazed by Ziggy's eternal optimism.

"It took him three winters, but eventually, I could stay upright long enough to pass the puck without falling over. By the time high school was over, I could hold my own pretty well."

Wes looked at me and set the Polaroids down between us.

"Local kids could be ruthless." His voice was soft and deep.

"We had these uniforms that were basically museum pieces," he continued. "Hand-me-downs from three different decades, maybe four. Mismatched socks, jerseys with numbers held on with fabric glue, and helmets repaired so many times with electrical tape they looked like they'd survived actual combat."

I leaned forward, eager to hear his story.

"The worst part was the skates." A smile began to play at the corners of his mouth.

"Most of us were wearing whatever we could find at the secondhand shop in Rockland.

My first pair was two sizes too big and resoled with duct tape.

But we thought we were hot shit, you know?

Like we were practically professionals."

He paused and stared out at the water. I wondered whether he could see ghosts of kids skating on the glistening ocean.

"My friend Tony scored his first goal with his skate blade. It was a total accident—the puck bounced off the boards weirdly, caught some crazy angle, and hit his foot just right. Went straight into the net like he'd planned it that way."

For the first time since I'd met Wes, he appeared genuinely relaxed, caught up in the memory of being young and ridiculous.

"Kid was so surprised he fell over backward." Wes shook his head and laughed. "He went down like a tree chopped down, flat on his back in the middle of his celebration. The whole team dogpiled him anyway, acting like we'd won the Stanley Cup."

I grinned along with the story, caught up in the image of the kids in their secondhand gear, celebrating a fluke goal like it was the most important thing that had ever happened. The storytelling was infectious.

Suddenly, something changed. Mid-gesture, Wes's hand froze in the air, and the smile faded from his face.

"Tony… he…" Wes's voice caught on whatever came next, the words sticking in his throat. He stared down at the photos.

The silence that followed was heavy. I didn't try to fill it. Wes's posture told me that whatever he was wrestling with needed space rather than questions.

He finally spoke again. "Anyway, we were kids. Felt like kings."

He stood abruptly. "Need more coffee." He moved toward the screen door. "Thanks for showing me these."

I sat on the porch for a long time after Wes disappeared inside, listening to the distant sounds of him moving around the cottage—the clink of a spoon against ceramic and the soft thud of cabinets opening and closing.

It was late in the morning, the sun rising high overhead. I decided to follow the path back to the abandoned rink.

The rink looked different in the brighter sun—less mystical and more matter-of-fact. Rust collaborated with plants to reclaim what humans had abandoned.

I settled onto what remained of the players' bench, a weathered plank that had been bolted between two posts and somehow survived decades of New England weather. The wood was warm under my legs, heated by the sunlight.

I pulled out my field notebook. At the top of the page, I wrote: Memory and place—how physical spaces hold onto community history.

My original research proposal had been full of clinical language about economic decline, population loss, and infrastructure decay.

It was all true and measurable, perfect for the kind of academic paper that would satisfy my degree requirements and maybe earn a footnote in someone else's bibliography.

As I sat and stared at the rink, I wondered whether I'd been asking the wrong questions.

It's not just about what gets abandoned, I wrote. It's about what lingers. This rink hasn't seen a game in years, maybe decades, but it's still alive in some way. I need to look beyond the ecological processes happening here and examine what this place meant to the people who used it.

I sketched the layout from memory, trying to map where the face-off circles would have been and where the penalty boxes might have stood.

Somewhere in Whistleport's town records—or maybe in the basement of the local newspaper office—there were probably team rosters from the years this place was active.

I found myself thinking about my relationship with hockey—how it had always been Ziggy's passion that I'd borrowed, never quite my own. Even now, my strongest hockey memories weren't about the game itself. They were about friendship.

For Wes, though, hockey appeared to mean something different. It was deeper and more complicated, tied up with memories that hurt too much to examine directly.

A gentle breeze rustled through the birch tree that had grown up through the center line, making the leaves shimmer like green coins. Somewhere in the undergrowth, a chipmunk chattered at an unseen rival.

I closed the notebook and sat for a while longer in the quiet, watching shadows lengthen across the cracked asphalt.

Tomorrow, I'd start asking different questions.

Not only about what had been lost but also about what could be restored.

About moving beyond the economics of decline toward the possibility of return.

Perhaps the most essential elements of my research wouldn't be about documenting endings. They would be about finding ways to begin again.