Life on the island
By the time Montgomery and de Haas arrived in Ireland, they were already well practiced in embracing uncertainty.
He had recently retired from professional hockey after playing his career at the professional level in North America and Europe, and briefly considered joining the Calgary Fire Department, following a family path rooted in public service.
His brother, Bo, was a firefighter, and their father, Rod, is a fire chief in Saskatchewan. The lure of stability was real but fleeting, and curiosity, as so often in his life, won out.
They were living on a small island in Malaysia when De Haas came across a post for seasonal caretakers on Great Blasket Island. She was hesitant at first, unsure how competitive the process could be, but the idea stuck. When she saw the listing again, she sent it to Montgomery. At the time, they were preparing to leave for another island in Indonesia for volunteer work.
The application process took months, complicated by pandemic delays. Ultimately, Great Blasket Island property managers Billy O’Connor and Alice Hayes agreed to give the young, adventurous couple a chance.
“They’re a nice couple,” O’Connor said The Athletics in 2022. “So we said we’d give it a try.”
When they finally arrived on the island, they were, as Montgomery put it, immediately thrown into the “deep end.”
“What was really eye-opening was that they dropped us off that first week and there was a huge storm coming,” Montgomery remembers. “No one was allowed to come to the island or leave the island if you wanted to. The only way out was maybe a helicopter. It was like you are here now. This is where you are going to live for the next six months.”
Almost immediately, Montgomery noticed what he described as the “special energy” of the island and especially the absence of noise that he had never experienced before.
“Another thing that stands out is the stillness and stillness of it all,” he said. The couple had just arrived from Indonesia, where they had completed their yoga course, an enriching but noisy chapter.
Montgomery asked Olympics.com to pause for a moment and listen to our own environment. Maybe a car passes by, or the hum of a refrigerator. None of that existed on the island. “We got to go to this island and just be in this silence. All you hear are the birds and the seals and the wind,” he said. “It was quite special.”
For someone who had spent years surrounded by air horns and roaring hockey crowds, the contrast was striking. Yet the silence on Great Blasket Island felt more familiar than strange.
Even during his playing career, Montgomery resisted letting hockey become his entire identity, leaning instead toward meditation, visualization, and practices that were far from mainstream in the sport at the time.
“I never really wanted my identity to always be about being a hockey player. I always knew there was life outside of hockey,” he said.
Life on the island soon took on a completely new rhythm. Their days were spent cleaning and maintaining cottages, welcoming overnight guests, running a small coffee shop and lighting fires against the Atlantic wind. Among the visitors it was often just Montgomery, the Hare, their dog Lenny and of course the seals.
“It was a big adjustment, I think, going from a hockey player to living a lonely life on an island, for sure,” he said. “But I’ve always tried to find that peace outside of the game. I’ve always loved nature and just going out, even alone, for a walk in nature.”
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