“Hockey”

Slap…Bang…Slap…Boom…a hockey stick hitting a puck on wet pavement. Drowsily, half asleep, I found this sound, my Saturday morning alarm clock, soothing and welcoming. Through the open window, the breeze brought a chill made me to wrap up tighter in my blanket and the distant sounds of the outdoor inline hockey game slowly put me to sleep again, until the roar of the fans woke me up again. In Switzerland, inline and ice hockey are big. Not as big as football--or as we call it in the States, soccer—but definitely a major pastime.
Coming out of a meeting one night at the church where I was doing an internship, I stopped in surprise. It was about ten o’clock in the evening and there were cars everywhere. Parked and leaving. People were wandering around, looking for their car. The street was full of cars waiting to pull onto the main road where there was another traffic jam. When I had gone into the meeting, the street was fairly empty. As I was riding my bicycle home, I couldn’t figure out why there was a huge amount of traffic so late at night. The most traffic I had ever seen up to that point was a few blocks of cars backed up at the roundabout each morning and afternoon. I was told later that there was an ice hockey rink or a "Eisbahn" about a kilometer from the location of the church.
The Biel ice-hockey team was a “B” team—A smaller team from a smaller city that would play other smaller cities in Switzerland and other places. However, during my year long stay in Switzerland, The Biel team was quite good and was moving up into the A team leagues. It was quite exciting to hear the rumble in grocery stores and in people’s homes about Biel Hockey. Of course, it was nothing compared to the World Cup excitement, but when a home team is doing well, the whole town ends up feeling the excitement--even foreign visitors, such as myself.
Hockey was not always so fun and friendly. Though the Saturday morning games were sweet sounding and a pleasant way to wake up, the hockey rink across the street in the park was not always so pleasant. Sometime early summer there was a week-long tournament. During the day, it wasn’t so bad, though there was less parking on our street and more cars and people around. The food booths in the park were fun to visit to buy a Bratwurst or a stick of cotton candy. The excitement was catching and all the neighborhood boys spent most of their free-time over at the rink watching the games.
After all the games had been played, the beer tent would fill up with folks and the music began blaring. One night about 3am, I had just about enough of it. I was tired of the bass shaking my bed and pounding in my ears. Earplugs and pillows over the head are no defense against the beat of a techno song turned up to the highest decibel. I went down to the living room, hoping that being on the ground floor would help, but no, it wouldn’t work. It was just as pounding and shaking as up in my 3rd story room, maybe even worse. I poured a glass of wine, hoping that the alcohol would lull me to sleep, but though I got pretty drowsy, I ended up still tossing and turning. I just had to lay there and listen, hoping that sometime in the night, the players and the fans would grow tired or pass out. Amazingly, I did fall asleep sometime around 4am, but woke at 6am to the sound of Slap…Bang…Slap…Boom…a hockey stick hitting a puck on wet pavement.