We Alaskans

Puck 'donking': The art of finding free hockey pucks around Anchorage

Ice skating at Cheney Lake in East Anchorage a few days ago, my skates clattered across the inch-high ice mounds brought on by our sultry weather. I was the only skater on the lake. A few ice fishermen knelt over their holes trying to coax hatchery rainbows from the water. As I looked for smooth ice, I couldn't resist cruising the snow berms surrounding the rink, built up from plowing. I slowed down and looked for hockey pucks. It was a poor showing, but my puck hunting habit was still there.

In the 1960s, I lived in East Anchorage and attended Nunaka Valley Elementary School. Ice skating was our winter entertainment and hockey was what drew me to the rink. Anybody who attended Nunaka Valley during that era knew the legendary principal Bond Whitmore.

Whitmore was a hockey nut and maintained three separate rinks for ice skaters: one for hockey, one for broomball and an oval for speed skating and everything else. Maybe we didn't maintain all three rinks every year, but always at least two. In those days, the janitor and the kids shoveled the snow and flooded the rinks. Once the snow had stopped falling, Whitmore recruited four or five sixth-grade boys. Dressed in a droopy down parka and unzipped galoshes, he would open the classroom door, crook his finger and order us to get on our boots and jackets and come outside to shovel the rinks.

We'd fling the snow over the hockey boards or scrape it into berms surrounding the other rinks. The janitor usually flooded the ice at night using a T-shaped contraption made of pipe, perforated on the bottom and screwed on to a stout hose that snaked out of the school furnace room and across the playground to the rinks. If kids were helping, everyone wanted to hold the pipe because we flooded the rink with hot water and the pipe warmed our hands.

Everything's different — except pucks

Every aspect of hockey equipment has changed since I was a kid; like everything else, I guess. All of it is lighter, bigger, better and safer — except the puck, a 3-by-1-inch disk of black vulcanized rubber that weighs between 5.5 and 6 ounces. I spent hours shooting the puck against the boards, trying to lift it and reveling in the satisfying thwack that reverberated throughout the rink. Sometimes I was too successful and to my horror, lifted it over the boards and buried it in the snow. While now I can afford all the high-tech equipment I need, I still experience a jolt of joy when I find a puck nestled in the snow outside the boards of a hockey rink.

If you don't play hockey, you would be surprised how far a puck can soar away from the rink. I've found pucks 50 feet away and farther. When a player winds up for a slap shot and rings the pipe on top of the net, it deflects the puck into the stratosphere. I've seen a few pucks float over the boards and hit windshields on moving cars, and parked cars, too. What happens after that is another story.

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That joy of finding pucks has not left me after a mediocre high school and beer league hockey career. All of it has led to a sport that an old friend and I call "puck donking." The origin of that name is lost to my memory. The season begins at breakup. When the snow starts to melt, the black pucks absorb the sun's heat and melt the snow surrounding them to reveal themselves to anyone who cares to look down in the snow. And we cared to look.

The first time we donked was at the Tikishla Park rink at the end of East 20th, now called the Scotty Gomez Hockey Rink. We scored 76 pucks in one day and lined those trophies on the hood of my friend's truck for a photo. We donked at other rinks, like East High and Bartlett High schools. The density wasn't like the Tikishla rink, but they were there, even beneath the bleachers.

It's easy to be fooled when you're donking. Many players tape their sticks with black tape and as it gets worn and tattered from play, they rip it off and toss it over the boards. All donkers can see is something black and we are compelled to dig for that "black gold." What's worse is finding dog poop. Which is perhaps, poetic justice because hockey folklore suggests that in hockey's early years, kids used frozen cow dung for pucks as they scooted across ponds playing shinny hockey.

Joy rediscovered

For 15 years, I worked in an office across the street from the hockey rink on the Delaney Park Strip at Ninth Avenue and E Street, coincidentally one of the first rinks on which I first played hockey when I was a kid. In the spring, during breaks for fresh air, I wandered around the perimeter of the boards and beyond looking for pucks. I also found pucks that floated over the boards that had smacked our office building and became stranded on the sidewalk.

A co-worker and I held a competition in which he'd stack the pucks he found on my desk and I'd do the same at his desk after my forays. The younger, and more athletic kids knew how to climb on the building at the south end of the rink to donk pucks that had sailed over the fence and landed on the roof. I wanted to gather a pile from up there, too, but I couldn't muster the strength to pull myself up and donk that mother lode.

Last year, searching through my crawlspace for a cat carrier, I found a heavy canvas sack. I picked it up and it was loaded with hockey pucks. These days, a hinky back and a twice-broken ankle (one cracked by a hockey puck) keep me off the ice more than I like. But the joy in finding those pucks still brightened my day.

Scott Banks is an Anchorage freelance writer.

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