HOWE

HOWE
9


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Three days later, after the fog of the celebration’s hangover had lifted, there was a big Stanley Cup parade planned downtown. My Dad had to work, but a lot of businesses, the Michigan House of Representatives in Lansing included, closed for the day, while other people called in sick to work so they could see their beloved hockey team in the parade. Suburbanites funneled into the city en masse from Detroit's various arteries – Woodward Avenue from the north, Interstate 75 from the North, I-96 from the West, and Michigan Avenue from the Southwest -- still flying those Red Wings car flags. Mass crowds began assembling around Hart Plaza and Woodward Avenue just after daybreak. Jim Rund, my brother Patrick, my mom, and I all were among them. Jim spent the night Monday night, and on Tuesday morning we piled into my Mom's minivan and hit the road to Detroit, hoping to congratulate the players and see the Stanley Cup. Parking was hard to come by in Detroit, but we eventually found a spot and filed out, working our way through the crowds to the parade route. We stopped at one of the tent sales that sold Stanley Cup merchandise, and we each got to pick out a new, officially-licensed Red Wings Stanley Cup tee shirt for the parade. The parade route was so packed with fans that some resorted to climbing traffic lights and light poles for better vantage points, giving Jim and I the idea to climb a tree to see, at one point.

It was a sweltering hot day, and even in the shade of the tree you could feel the sun radiating off the concrete that surrounded us, the city air thick with smog, the sewer drains hissing steam clouds. We bought bottled water from a street vendor and dumped some of it on our heads, letting the ice cold water trickle down our necks and onto our tee shirts. From our street corner, we saw the giant, papier-mache octopus, Stanley, leading the parade in a red flatbed truck, then the procession of red convertibles, from which the players, wearing stylish sunglasses, waved to the crowds, and finally, bringing up the caboose, Steve Yzerman, wearing white Stanley Cup tee shirt and silver-rimmed sunglasses, hoisting the Stanley Cup from his own red Mustang convertible, his wife and daughter smiling and waving from the seat next to him. Even the red Miller beer zamboni from Joe Louis Arena made an appearance in the parade, driven by the octopi-handler, Al Sabotka. Tens of thousands of adoring Wings fans saluted Scotty Bowman, Brendan Shanahan, Sergei Fedorov, Steve Yzerman, Mike Vernon, Kris Draper, Darren McCarty, Chris Osgood, and company along the parade route, each of them drawing enormous applause.

Later that evening, we found out on the news that there had been over a million people at the parade, twice as many as had gathered for either one of the Pistons 1989 and 1990 NBA Championship parades. The aerial shots of Woodward Avenue were incredible. It looked like a moving sea of red and white, parting only for the procession of convertibles. It felt like many of those fans had grown up alongside that Red Wings team just like I had, going back from one heartbreak to another in 1994, 1995, and 1996.

That Saturday, a week to the day after the Red Wings had won the Stanley Cup, my mom and dad packed the minivan and roused us out of bed at dawn. My family had plans to visit Cedar Point with my Aunt Nancy, my Uncle Paul, and my cousin Joey, so Patrick and I were out of bed in a hurry. We ate a quick breakfast of Lucky Charms and brushed our teeth before we heard my Uncle Paul honking from the driveway. We piled into the minivan and hit the road South towards Ohio, my Mom's burgundy minivan tailing my Uncle Paul's silver Chrysler. We drove over the Toledo River, where great tug boats tooted on the water in between the smokestacks and rail yards along the riverside, then past hundreds of miles of what seemed a never-ending farm country in Ohio, until at last we pulled into Sandusky, where "Home of America's Rollercoast!" signs greeted us alongside Lake Erie.

We drove into the park via the Cedar Point causeway, a four-lane road with stone embankments on either side, the choppy waves of Lake Erie breaking smoothly into the rocks, until the steel towers of roller coasters appeared ahead, yellow, red, blue, and neon green steel roller coasters casting shadows over smaller wooden roller coasters and the sandy shores of Lake Erie below. "Semi-Charmed Kind of Life" by Third Eye Blind played on the radio as we inched towards the ticket toll booths. I squirmed anxiously in my seat belt, eager to stretch my legs and eager for the day ahead. I couldn't wait to ask Joey about his favorite roller coaster, about where he was when he watched the Stanley Cup, if he had seen Yzerman at the parade. We parked next to each other in the vast parking lot and we all got out to stretch. Flocks of sea gulls squawked and scavenged the parking lot grounds, and strange-looking fish flies coated the light poles throughout the parking lot like a fresh coat of paint. I braced myself in anticipation of "the drill," my Uncle Paul's traditional means of greeting me with his finger in my ribcage. Or maybe he'd have a new joke about the nuns at school to accost me with. When my cousin Joey climbed out of the back seat of his car, though, I saw that he'd been crying.

"Well, did you guys hear the news?" my Uncle Paul asked my parents, matter-of-factly, but I listened as though he was talking to me.

"No," my Mom responded, suddenly concerned, "what happened?"

"We just heard it on the radio on the way here," my Aunt Nancy chimed in, sounding heartbroken. "There was a limousine accident late last night."

"Konstantinov and Fetisov were in the limo. And a member of the training staff. After some Stanley Cup party," my Uncle Paul added stoically.

"Is he going to be OK?" I asked my Mom, but she stood there as if she hadn't heard me.

"We don't know yet," my Uncle Paul sighed, patting me on the shoulder. "We’d better get going, though," he said, pointing to his wristwatch and looking ahead to the park entrances.

There I stood, a couple hundred yards from the gates of the biggest roller coaster park in the world. In the early morning sun, I could smell from the parking lot the elephant ears, deep fried chicken fingers, and corndogs simmering in grease. The lines for all of the rides had just been opened to the general public and I heard the first shrieks and cries of joy as the first shuttles clinked up the first hill and then plummeted down along the hilly steel tracks. It was what should have been a boy's wonderland spread out before me, but the day suddenly seemed gray.

The tragic news of the limo accident sinking in, I felt overcome with a sense of sadness in my heart. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer, not the beginning. When your mom first broaches those terrible words, "back to school shopping," when the lightning bugs start disappearing, gradually, night by night, when the lawns yellow and flowers wilt, weary from July and August heat waves. That first Autumn breeze shuffles in, but the days are still too long and hot to be Fall. You wish you could go back and start it all over, but all you have left are the memories and the deep pang that it all went by too fast. It’s the feeling of summer dying.