FEBRUARY 2019 / SOUTHERNLIVING.COM
116me. I have read enough about it to
comprehend that.
It’s the why.
Why would I drive my pickup onto
any one of the Great Lakes, towing a
small house behind, which will keep
the howling winds from freezing off my
lips, nose, and ears? The hut has a
heater that (by all logic) should melt a
hole in the ice so it swallows us—hut,
truck, and all. But this rarely happens,
I am told, in part because the ice is so
thick and because, even with a heater,
it is still cold enough to kill a thin-
blooded man.
To even get at the fish, which have
somehow not frozen to death, you
have to saw out a hole big enough to
drop a baited line, a hole that will keep
freezing up. I don’t know about you,
but there is nothing that gets me in
the mood for fishing quite like the
familiar screaming of a Poulan Pro
and the rhythm of an ice ax.
The hole should not be big enough
to fall into, drunk, I am told, since I
cannot see how anyone could endure
this (huddled in the cold and staring
down into a tiny hole) if they were
sober. But of all things I cannot quite
wrap my mind around, this is the most
difficult: You have to bring an ice chest
out onto the ice to hold your beer. If
you just set it outside, it would freeze.
I just can’t comprehend this.
Maybe the reason it is all stuck in
my head is because of the one time I
ever witnessed people ice fishing, or
at least saw their little plywood huts.
I was in Minnesota when I noticed a
dark speck, approaching at a lope, on
the white ice. As it got closer, I saw that
it was a large rodent of some kind,
carrying a fish that it had apparently
stolen from the camp. In all my time
fishing in the sunshine, I never—not
even once—had a gopher swim out
and steal a speckled trout. ÂS
OME THINGS we just don’t
have to think about down
here. Cold, frosty things.
Which, in my case, is
probably a good thing. I
like to picture my mind as a
bucket, which is filled with
all useful things. The more useless
things that get dumped into it, the
more useful ones spill out over its rim.
Some people have plenty of room in
their buckets for both, for 5 gallons of
memories, trivia, and even song lyrics.
But I have come to realize that mine
is very small—not so much a bucket
as a teacup.
My point is that here, south of
the permafrost, we do not need to
contemplate so many things thistime of year—like, say, a snow shovel,
though I guess it would be good for
beating fire ants or chiggers to death.
We don’t have to choose snow tires
or mukluks.
That leaves ample room for
pineapple upside-down cake and
sausage biscuits. I like to think of
winter as short—a thing in passing.
I like to stand in the drugstore and
wonder what SPF would be suitable
for a pasty man. I like to think that, any
day now, only the early mosquitoes
will be biting, not wolverines. My point
is, I do not have room in my limited
mind for the foibles of chilly men.
So why, for several weeks now, have
I been thinking about ice fishing?
It’s not the how of it that hauntsThey Must Be Mad
One cold-weather pastime I’ll never understand
by
RICK BRAGG
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN CUNEO