The railroad tracks were our path to the Sump, our trash-strewn hockey hideaway between late December and mid-February each year in the 1980s. Long Island, New York, flat, sandy, and jammed with houses and the now-familiar dreck of suburban life, nail salons, car washes, and crappy diners. But the Sumps – dug out by municipalities to contain runoff from the streets, were oases for intrepid teenagers, in summer for the fact that no one could see or hear you – firecrackers, BB guns, Styrofoam rafts, rope swings – and in winter for the ice skating. Every day after school and most weekends. But to get there, for us punks from Mineola (the one claim to fame, and it’s a good one, being that it was birthplace of Lenny Bruce), we had to hop the fence behind our house, walk the tracks of the Long Island Railroad for a half mile, and then, crossing the tracks into the vaunted neighborhoods of the posher Garden City, clamber over the fence rimming the Sump. Once inside, we were safe from nosy neighbors and bored cops; the only real dangers were the possibility of falling through the ice (seldom) and bashing each other with sticks and flying pucks (frequent but not serious).

The tracks, however, were suffused with peril and menace. A few years before, at 2:00 in the morning, a vanload of teenagers, probably drunk, had been hit by a train traveling at high speed as the driver attempted to beat the gate. Nine out of the 10 were killed; news reports described the horrific crash scene: strewn limbs, vehicle parts, and errant shoes. The bloody corridor was immediately behind our home; we could not help but be mindful of the devastation that had occurred on this very section of track as we trudged to the Sump for our not-entirely-legal-but-mostly-harmless afternoon entertainment. Stephen King’s youthful heroes had walked the tracks to find a single body; we did our best not to think of the dismembered nine. Our daily walk also, inevitably, paralleled the “third rail,” the supercharged electric steel rail that powered the trains and had, what appeared even to my callow self, a wholly inadequate guard to protect trespassers, a single thin strip of wood bolted on top; the rail itself, silent and menacing, was entirely exposed otherwise. We often stepped nimbly on the wood to cross the tracks, doing our best to evoke weightlessness. The approach to the Sump also meant crossing the busy road where the teenagers were hit, followed by another few hundred yards of track before we scaled the fence to safety and pond hockey paradise.

As an emerging teenager I was keenly aware of the real dangers presented by the railroad tracks – the LIRR’s trains that would loom swiftly on the horizon and be upon us in seconds. An added terror was the electric trains, which approached with shocking speed and near silence, until they were upon you, at which point the engineers would loose the blare of the horn that, alone, could blow you off your feet at short range. The diesel engines, though heard and avoided from a distance, were awful to behold for a different reason, because the noise of the engines, combined with equally-powerful horns, would shake your body and rattle your teeth and split your head open – even from inside our house. Conversation was impossible for the first five seconds as it screamed past. If, however, you’re 120 pounds and standing 15 feet away in a ditch of weeds and crushed stones and trash, the noise was catastrophic. It pushed out all thought and filled your soul with abject terror. We would clamp our hands over ears, grit our teeth, and shut our eyes and hope the beast stayed on the rails as it roared by. And then, following the whoosh of wind in its wake, we turned and jogged on down the tracks to the Sump, our sticks and skates jauntily bouncing on our shoulders. One final challenge remained.

We had learned there were two kinds of fences in suburban Long Island, the ones separating our tiny yards, with the stiff wire tops twisted and bent over to form a safe, if not handsome, rim. These were usually four feet tall and were barely an impediment to our marauding, and then there was the other kind, whose twisted wires poked skyward, like razor-sharp twist-ties positioned every two inches, protruding a couple of inches higher than the top bar. These were the suburbs’ answer to Latin America’s concrete and broken glass. You could get over them if you really wanted to, but it meant some careful planning, not a small amount of acrobatics, and a pointed determination to get to whatever was on the other side.

To hop the safe fences, we had developed a flamboyant method reminiscent of Errol Flynn at sea or Buster Keaton hopping between train cars, involving a short leap, a quick grip, and a dashing swing of the legs. Running toward the fence (playing tag, Manhunt, or Ringolevio), we leaped forward and upward, briefly resting our midriffs on the top bar, preferably landing on the smooth side, and then leaning far over to the other side. In the same motion, you would put your right arm down on the far side and, reaching low, tightly grab a handful of chain-links, and, at the same time, kick your legs over. The more athletic of our bunch could do this almost without breaking stride, the trick being to swing low and get a good grip of the far side of the fence (the fulcrum), which made your arm into a spring-loaded lever as your legs whipped over your head. If you landed with a short hop and continued onward, we imagined the flair and aplomb was regarded as an Olympic event, preferably, by similarly-aged bystanding girls.

The fence around the Sump, however, was the other kind. Six feet tall and rusty, there was simply no safe way to hop it. We tossed our skates and sticks over, and then, jamming our toes into the links and climbing hand over hand, we teetered at the top with straightened arms, briefly, gingerly, well aware of our tender bits separated from the sharp metal by mere inches and the fabric of our jeans and underwear. We then swung a leg over, planted a toe in the links, and hopped clear on the far side. We occasionally scraped the insides of our thighs and arms, but we were never stripped of our genitals as we’d feared.

Once inside the Sump’s perimeter fence, we were soon out of sight in the bushes at the rim. We slid down the steep sandy sides and skittered out onto the ice. And our pond hockey lives would begin.

It is almost impossible to express why pond hockey in these conditions amongst a handful of teenage boys was so consuming and thrilling. There are the motions of ice skating, which, for the skilled skater on an open pond with no snow and few cracks, comes the same laugh-out-loud joy as swooping downhill on skis, or a snowboard, or the first moments of dropping into a wave on a surfboard. The effortless speed, the smoothness of the expansive ice, the bracing cold, the tap-tap of skate and puck, which, coupled with the difficult act of slipping a puck between two boots as two or three others try to stop you, must be as close to a physiological high as you can get without sex or drugs.

Pond hockey is a different game from one played inside a rink’s boards. There are no real boundaries, meaning speed is everything. If you have the puck and you’re faster than everyone, you simply outskate them. The final seconds approaching the goal presents the only challenge, requiring a few head fakes, some quick back and forth with the stick and puck, and then tap in the goal. Our strategy was that simple. It was an arms race for speed and finesse. My big brother, who was always – and remains – a half-foot taller than I, had us scrappy players figured out immediately. He’d let us race and zoom and tire ourselves out, and he’d wait near the goal, tactically positioning his body as he skated backwards and poked at the puck in a most annoyingly effective way. It was almost unfair in its cleverness and utility. He was usually teamed up with Carl, an aggressive, competitive, mouthy and frankly hostile friend whose athleticism was unparalleled but who had discovered skating a little later than the rest of us. Carl and my brother formed a formidable opponent. Samson and I would give-and-go like two bodies sharing a single hockey brain, maybe with better skating and stick skills than Carl and my brother, but woefully undermatched at the tactical game. They could actually see a game from above, cutting angles, and, Gretzy-like, positioning themselves where a play was about to occur and serving passes to each other that appeared to me, unable to see beyond the moment, to be almost telepathic in their strategy. They were maestros of pond hockey. Samson and I more closely resembled improvising artists, a pair of hockey-playing figure skaters whose plays were free-form and whose medium was the stick and puck. Our games were always close.

And then there was Billy, Samson’s little brother, who would follow us around like Sancho Panza – abrasive, shockingly foulmouthed, incapable of coherent conversation, and often muttering unintelligible observations about the stupidity of certain people – but always up for whatever hijinks we proposed. In winter it was pond hockey and in summer it was roller hockey in the street or some other light hooliganism at the Sump or city park. Billy was the fifth wheel, the punching bag. When he and I had slashed a hornet’s nest with metal curtain rods, I had accidentally (but certainly negligently) slashed him across the bridge of his nose, opening a gash that bled for days and that left what appeared to be a tribal scar. His little body was covered in these types of wounds, punctures, jammed knuckles, busted nose, bruised ribs. Inevitably, when we were able to play more organized hockey, he assumed the position, so to speak, and became our goalie, because it’s what the posse needed, and who the hell else would want the job? Since he was the fifth of our troupe, and pond hockey requires a sixth for a three-on-three, we were always recruiting others in the neighborhood, kids we could talk into buying a pair of used skates and stick and, in exchange for our dangerous form of friendship, agreed to hazard the fences and railroad tracks and wobbling around the ice as we skated circles around them. This sixth person was rarely, for good reason, the same individual, but, since having him was essential to balance the teams, we never stopped our recruitment. One eventual victim, whom I’ll call Benny, learned that he even enjoyed our company and found that, by imposing his own brand of sadism, could balance the tables. He was big and gruff and dangerous and enjoyed pummeling Billy. This was our agreement: he could take out his aggression on Billy provided that he brought his skates and stick. When we played three-on-three, he and Billy were interchangeable to the two teams; the matchup was always Carl and my brother and Samson and I and whichever of Billy and Benny happened to lace up his skates first and pick a side.

The ice in the Sump was imperfect. Because the water drained here from the adjacent neighborhood storm drains, the surface was land-mined with trash, Styrofoam cups, tennis balls, plastic bottles, and beer cans. Once, during a particularly long day of play, we even found an unopened can of Budweiser, its rim frozen in place and barely protruding above the surface. We popped the lid and, inserting a hollow strand of brown reed, lay on our bellies and took turns sucking out the beer. Since we never thought ahead enough to bring water to drink, it was particularly satisfying and remains, to this day, the benchmark of satisfaction in a can. For a suburban kid craving the freedom of the wilds, this represented a thrilling highlight of my young life, as close as I felt I could get to the free-wheeling life on Huck Finn’s river. When we had reached the surface of the Sump’s ice, we were free to play our wild game, cursing at each other, racing back and forth, drinking discarded beer. We each had dreams of playing in the NHL, knew the Islanders’ numbers and stats, and thinking that we were like the hockey version of the Cutters of Breaking Away, a rag-tag band of talented kids who would show the rich kids from Garden City that real hockey’s roots were the Sump. One of us once announced that, if our lives were a movie, the soundtrack would be “Eye of the Tiger.”

In truth, we were terrible. When we finally managed to join a rec league in nearby Christopher Morley Park, what had seemed so brilliant at the Sump became clear for what it was: haphazard and futile. Since we had never taken slapshots or tried to lift the puck at the Sump (against our few rules) we didn’t know how. We had never learned to actually shoot accurately, and we could never get close enough, except on a rare breakaway, to try to deke the goalie and slip the puck in the net. Worse, we had no idea how to use our bodies to check or avoid hits. We were creamed. The only person whose game transitioned to organized hockey was Samson who, because of his strength and athleticism, quickly developed a physical game that earned him a top slot on the hallowed “travel team.”

As we grew up and followed other interests, girlfriends, college, careers, and then families, we all drifted away. Carl, perhaps overwhelmed by the pressures in his head, took his own life; God knows what happened to Benny. Samson and Billy are still in New York; Samson cultivating a successful career and Billy, succumbing to what must have been a latent schizophrenia, lives on the streets. His politics are emphatically Republican, not the conservative brand of old bankers and firefighters and cops that we knew growing up in New York, but the recent, hateful Trumpian kind. When we were growing up, Donald Trump was “The Donald,” a fixture on Howard Stern’s radio program that Howard would call for a gross-out or color commentary on a recent local news item involving sex or money. The Donald was disgusting and harmless and sort of funny if you wanted validation of your basest instincts, being, of course, vulgarity, lust, and greed. Even Howard was occasionally appalled by his comments. To Billy, this worldview has consumed him, stuck, as he is, in an endless loop of maudlin teenage angst.

We’re now in our 50s. I have four grown children of my own now. We live in Maine, on Peaks Island, where we are lucky enough to have three ponds to choose from when the ice conditions are right. With my wife, this makes six; in other words, three-on-three. They are all decent skaters and hockey players. My wife is game, but she has only one good eye and a terrible pair of 1990s skates that are nearly impossible to stand on, let alone skate with. She’s the cheerful and hapless sixth from my youth. We pass to her when she positions herself in front of the goal. My daughter has that same inexplicable knack that my brother and Carl had, seeing the game from aloft, anticipating plays before the rest of us and almost always the leading scorer. The rest of us, the four boys, fast, mildly skilled at stick-handling, race and pass in a disorganized but joyful mash that barely resembles the hockey played on television.

I get vitriolic texts from Billy to this day, usually links to a YouTube video of his favorite Tucker Carlson diatribe or a Tweet by Trump, against people of color, homosexuals, women, immigrants, and whoever in the world believes in trying to help someone else. They’re all chumps, according to Tucker and Billy and The Donald, losers and suckers. And Whole Foods and Amazon are promoting the Gay Agenda to take control of our children’s lives, Billy tells me. When he’s at his most lucid, he screams, “Wake up! Don’t you care about your children?”

Two winters ago, on the day after Christmas, my wife, children, and I all piled into the minivan. Finding a frozen pond outside Boothbay Harbor, we pulled over and had an impromptu three-on-three until we were exhausted, our breaths puffing out in clouds. Occasionally, someone driving by would yell obscenities that the ice was too thin, or that skating wasn’t allowed here. Probably someone from away, more accustomed to the prescribed life of the suburbs of Massachusetts or New York, not a Mainer, an adopted identity I now ascribe to myself. We tend to leave one another alone, unless asked for help. Life is dangerous and fun outdoors. This past Christmas, we rented a house on Mount Desert Island for a few days; we climbed to the top of the Beehive in Acadia National Park with our skates and sticks. The peaks rose up on all sides, and it was certainly the most serene and picturesque location for a pond hockey game I’d ever seen. One of my sons fell through the ice; but he hauled himself out, changed his clothes, and kept playing. My dog Georgie, a handsome Australian shepherd not known for his smarts, wandered over to the hole and also fell in. Cricket, a black mutt who knows better, stayed clear, not just of the hole in the ice but also of our game. Final score, 10 to 6.

There are numerous pond hockey games around New England and the northern Midwest. They are often organized into Pond Hockey Classic Tournaments; they have prizes and bragging rights. I’ve played in a few. There are also marginally organized towns and villages that are progressive enough to clear the ice from the village pond. Portland, Maine, my home town, is one of them. But, to me, pond hockey is best played in a place and manner that is slightly, if not overtly, illegal. That perfect patch of ice, hidden away behind fences, on a day in December when the ice is black and clear. Furtively carrying stick and skates, testing the ice’s thickness with the butt end of the stick, and then lacing up and playing an unsanctioned game. I envision a game on Central Park’s Model Boat Pond; the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. (if it ever gets cold enough again), and on those beautiful palace fountain pools of Europe such as the Mirror Pool or Neptune’s Fountain at Versailles, or on one of the remote ponds at Hamstead Heath in London. The more unlikely, the more exciting the game. I refer to our illicit games as Pirate Hockey, inspired by the inherent illegality and danger of the game of my youth.

At the Sump, there were times that the neighbors or cops would flush us out, yelling at us that we were trespassing, that the ice was unsafe. And we would scatter, scooping up our boots and racing to the other side of the ice, scrambling over the fence and slipping away into the neighborhoods before they could interrogate us, take our names and call our parents.

We were back the next day. And the day after that.