Author Ronnie Shuker veered away from personal narrative through most of The Country and the Game: 30,000 Miles of Hockey Stories.

Closing paragraphs in the final chapter — British Columbia: The Last Game — are exceptions and include unvarnished accounts of his father’s slide into advanced dementia, along with a recap of Shuker’s last trip to the rink with dad. 

“I was hoping readers would grant me a chance to talk about my life in the game,” said Shuker, who investigated hockey’s impact on Canadians during an eight-month expedition that brought him to every province and territory in the country

“A lot of people have hockey moms. For me, I had a hockey dad.”

Shuker was en route home to the Toronto area after the coast-to-coast chronicling marathon when he stopped in Kamloops to visit his father, Ronald Shuker, who was staying in The Hamlets at Westsyde, a long-term care home.

He took his father to a Blazers game.

Coherence was fleeting, his brain was deteriorating and Ronald often didn’t recognize his son, but hockey seemed a brief reprieve from decline.

“When the game was on, the hallucinations disappeared,” Shuker writes in the book. “Gone were the conversations with ghosts, the phone calls from the news anchors on CNN, the boats floating down the middle of street, the robbers trying to steal his stuff. He stopped trying to stick a knife into the toaster ‘to check if it’s alive’ and didn’t stare at the chair cushions ‘waiting for them to move.’”

Shuker said his father, a former journalist, would have implored him to be forthright when relaying the symptoms of dementia — to recount his departure from lucidity with the same detail empowered throughout the book to illuminate the country and the game.

“You read these travel books and a lot of writers will describe a country through a certain lens — France through wine, Italy through food, India through spirituality, Japan through tradition or technology,” Shuker said.

“For me, hockey was natural because I’ve been in it all of my life.”

Explored are tiny hamlets and sizeable cities, their people and the vast highways and countryside that connects them.

Each chapter is teeming with description that puts readers in the passenger seat alongside Shuker in Gumpy, the car named for legendary goaltender Gump Worsley.

In B.C., for example, granite walls guide Gumpy west along the Glacier Highway toward Stewart and rain raps on the John Lalonde Roller Rink roof in Haida Gwaii.

“I didn’t want to binge on nationalism or anything like that,” Shuker said. “You know the old journalism adage — show don’t tell? I wanted to try and do that.”

Hockey was Shuker’s lens for Canada in The Country and The Game and his father put the camera in his hands, so it’s fitting the book’s last snapshot is a picture of their final hockey moments.

A young man sees Ronnie struggling to guide his father across the street toward Sandman Centre, so he lends a hand.

A perceptive couple — Alex and Stephanie Bell — notices the four blueberry muffins brought to keep Ronald occupied are scarfed before the first intermission, so hot dogs, popcorn and a supersize Coke are promptly delivered.

“He had a penchant for wandering, but also taking his clothes off in random places,” Shuker said with a laugh. “I was deathly terrified he would strip down right there, and I would end up on YouTube. I’m glad that didn’t happen and I’m sure part of that is Alex and Stephanie kept giving him food.”

The Memorial Cup-host Blazers doubled the visiting Everett Silvertips 6–3 on March 10, 2023, and Sweet Caroline echoed while father and son ambled out onto Mark Recchi Way.

“Everything went just perfect that night,” Shuker said of his last game with dad.

He adds in the book: “It was just father, son, and the game.”

Shuker was in the Tournament Capital this January to visit his parents and was interviewed by CBC Radio Kamloops before returning to Ontario.

“They just happened to air it on the morning of the 22nd [of January],” Shuker said. “Literally just a few hours later, my dad passed. There was some kind of symmetry. If he had to pass on a certain day, I’m glad it was that one.”