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Page'4, News, Tuesday, March 31, 1992 - EE - Editorial Tel.: 825-3747 amas : Single copies 50 cents. Subs. Publisher..............A. Sandy Harbinson The Terrace Bay - Schreiber News is published every Tuesday rates: $18 per year. Seniors $12 Adve rtising Mgr-...Linda R. dehingan o CN A by Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, 13 Simcoe Plaza, (local); $29 per year (out of 40 é tasDonaid : , le radius); $38 in U.S. Add CANOE, occas tors Darren MacDona = Terrace Bay, Ont., POT-2W0 Fax: 807-825-9233. Office hours ™ ; a as sels il ; GST to yearly subs. Advertising Rep.......... Cheryl Kostecki cn Tuesday-Friday, 9-5. Second class mailing permit 0867. davax koe Gee Fannie ae Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association ie » ASSL... eeeeeee = Aiitatien and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association. Lond (25 . Co-op Student................ arvin Fu Cup more a symbol of unity than the beaver could ever hope to be There was something bordering on mystical about seeing the Stanley Cup up close last week when it arrived in town on a Greyhound bus tour of Ontario. Here was the trophy that people like Armstrong, Horton, Bel- liveau, Richard, Gretzky, Lemieux and Messier have carried around the ice in triumph, the pinnacle of achievement in the hockey world. And here it was in a parking lot in Terrace Bay, no more than a few inches away. The cup itself has some characteristics of being a relic from a bygone era. If you examine the top of it you can see signs of the abuse it took in its early days, before it was revered as the oldest trophy in North American professional sports. You can also see inscribed names of teams most of us never knew existed, let alone won the Stanley Cup--ever hear of the Seattle Metropoli- tans? Me either, but they won the cup in 1917, the first American club ever to take Lord Stanley's mug down south. | In later years, the names of everyone associated with winning teams were listed right on the cup, from the team captain on down to the trainer. The obscure names are listed in the same point size as the legendary. When I think of the history behind the cup, of the hands and places it has touched through the years, I can't help but think that it really is the only constant in Canadian history, the one and only bit of Canadiana that means something to all Canadians across the linguistic and cultural spectrum. Without putting too fine a point on it, I would say that the cup symbolizes to Canadians what the Parthenon symbolizes to the Greeks, what the Coliseum symbolizes to Italians and what the Liberty Bell symbolizes to Americans. It's a connection to our past, and yet it's still part of our present and future. Before Meech Lake and Quebec separatism, before high inter- est rates and the recession, before even WWII and the Great Depression, there was hockey and the Stanley Cup. And long after people like Mulroney and Rae and Bourassa have become historical hiccups, the cup will still be there, more of a symbol of Canadian unity than the silly beaver could ever hope to be. Each year around this time, Canadians from coast to coast gather around their television sets to watch the hockey playoffs. Many people who don't watch even one regular season game join in this springtime ritual. It may be a sad sign of the times that there may be no playoffs this year. Say it ain't so, Mario. When former Maple Leaf Defenceman Borje Salming wrote his autobiography, he articulated very simply and clearly what hockey means to Canadians. As an outsider, he understood why it was that Canadian teams always seemed to pull off wins over technically superior Soviet and European teams. The normally quiet and reserved Canadians, Salming wrote, "do love hockey." +i LANG) / at j MY aby 2 Yo W4 In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes Andy Warhol The hunter--lets call him Lars--must have known he'd made a bad decision. Hunting alone in the Italian Alps was a risky proposition at the best of times. But in the. late fall, when the temperature can plummet and blizzards material- ize as fast as a sorcerer's spell, it was as danger- ous as dicing with death. The cold needled at his cheek- bones and gnawed at his wrists and ankles. He could feel it seeping inexorably through his hooded leather parka and the fur boots stuffed with straw. His aim had been true and his quarry--a fine, fat mountain goat--was wounded, no question about that. But the trail of blood flecks he'd been following & was vanishing before his eyes in a 3 welter of swirling snow. The sky } was an ugly purple bruise and the wind was snarling down from the north. And it was getting colder. If he could just find some shelter he could hunker down and start a fire. But there was no shelter--only barren rock and drifting snow. So tired, thought Lars as he limped along, leaning on his ice axe. /' ll just rest awhile. Kneel down. Catch my breath... . The two German mountain climbers had picked a wonderful day for a late September climb in the Italian Alps. The sun was so bright it hurt the eyes and from the broad back of the Sim- ilaun glacier, more than six thousand feet above sea level, they could see the ragged peaks of the Austrian Tyrol many miles to the northeast. They stopped, ate lunch, took photographs, were about to move on when one of them saw something brown and frail and skinny sticking out of the ice. It was an arm a human arm. And it was attached to the man called Lars. The rest of Lars, still kneeling as he died, was encased in ice. As was his ice axe, his straw filled Bronze age man famous " Arthur Black boots and parka, his weapons and his backpack. Well, what of it, you say. A rather grisly, but not all that uncommon, Alpine tragedy--a moun- taineer gets lost and freezes to death in a blizzard. Then some other mountaineers find his body. Is that so amazing? - Only when you examine the interval between death and resurrection. The German mountain climbers found the corpse on Sept. 19, 1991. Sci- entific analysis has determined that Lars took his last ragged breath some time around 2,000 B.C. In other words, give or take a century, the body of Lars the =: hunter is 4,000 years old. _ And remarkably preserved. His clothes are mostly gone, but there is still hair on his head and teeth in his mouth--even visible tattoos on his back. His Bronze Age ice axe looks like it was made yesterday and the flintstone knife on his belt is still sharp & enough to skin that goat, had a he caught up to it. It's ironic. A nameless, pre- literate hunter lives in obscuri- ty and dies alone in one of the remotest reaches of the planet; lies encased in glacial ice for four millennia and then, by a fluke, before the sun or the ravens or wolves could finish the job Mother Nature over- looked . . . he becomes a celebrity. For Lars is famous. His sightless eyes have already gazed back at readers from the pages of newspapers and magazines. His mummified mug has startled viewers on CTV News and The National. But is that it for Lars? After 4,000 years off- stage, just a flash of world fame, then back to the dustbin of history? Are you kidding? His 15 minutes aren't up yet. Last month, a Geneva woman appealed to the Swiss Foreign Ministry to claim the corpse. It's her father, she says, who disappeared in the 1970s. What next? Teamsters swearing it's Jimmy Hoffa? Fans protesting that they've found Elvis? Welcome to the 20th Century, Lars.