Iowa may have its baseball Field of Dreams, as depicted in the 1989 movie, but it has nothing on my brother Tim.
In December 2014, he made his own Rink of Dreams near his Sherwood Park, Alta., home.
I was headed to nearby Edmonton on business, and on a hunch we might meet, I tossed my skates and a stick into my vehicle.
In the evening, I called him. He told me to head for his Lutheran Church parking lot on the northeastern corner of Sherwood Park. Once there, he led me down into a tree-lined ravine where the Old Man Creek flowed. Except now it was frozen. Perfect.
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Tim had strung Christmas lights through the trees, cleared and scraped a winding ice route, chopped off a few branches, and created a crooked 400-foot long, five-foot wide rink.
Stick-handling the puck was tough, a breakaway would take forever, and the serpentine loops wreaked havoc with generating speed. Plus, you could get body-checked by a spruce.
Tim’s rink was unique and idyllic. It tested our faded skills. We were hockey crazy farm boys again. Tim’s 20-year-old son Nathaniel joined in.
Tim mentioned that church members used it minimally, and mostly sat around the firepit he had built there.
Tim got the fire going and we drank the hot chocolate he had brought.
Like Field of Dreams — all Tim needed was a movie. Oh, and for Wayne Gretzky to come out and show us how it’s done.
