Angling and Ice

I’ve lived in Bemidji, Minnesota, off and on since May 2003, almost eight years. And I’ve been fascinated by the winters and the cold and snow and frozen lakes since I witnessed my first fall to winter transition here—it’s so dramatic. When it freezes Lake Bemidji provides 11 square miles of real estate, so having a house on the lake is quite affordable in the winter. Back in Georgia, where I come from, ice on a lake (besides being highly unlikely) would make the fishermen scratch their heads and wonder what to do, but in northern Minnesota the only question seems to be “is the ice thick enough?” And when answer is yes, you go fishing.

I went ice fishing for the first time in my life on Thursday, March 3, 2011. As a matter of fact this was also my first time angling in Minnesota. A new friend took me ice fishing—an environmentally conscious enthusiastic outdoorsman and native Minnesotan; that’s some Minnesota nice. He drove us out on Lake Bemidji around one o’clock in the afternoon. Once we got to the spot, we took his clamshell pop-up tent fish house out of the back of his truck and we set it up. The clamshell looks like a really big suitcase or something a band would keep instruments or equipment in. I thought we were heading for one of those fancy fish houses that folks tow out onto the lake with their trucks and leave over the winter. They look like camper trailers; actually they’re basically campers with special wheel systems for lowering them to the ice and trapdoors in the floor for fishing. They have heat and some of them have stoves and generators for the lights and microwave oven and plasma TVs with satellite hook-ups. At any rate, we set up the fish house so he could mark where to drill the three holes through the four-foot thick sheet of ice. And then we had to drag the pop-up out of the way for the drilling. After he drilled the holes with his gas-powered ice auger, we had to level the area and drag the “house” back into place before we could get to fishing.

Inside the clamshell with The Art of Angling

This happened to be a couple days after my contributor’s copy of The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, edited by Henry Hughes, arrived in the mail. My poem “Bemidji in Spring,” which is about lake ice and ice fishing, is included along with work by Homer, Shakepeare, Goethe, Yeats, Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Audre Lorde, and Derek Walcott, and younger voices like Kevin Young, Cecily Parks, Ed Skoog, and Derick Burleson. I took the anthology along; I thought it might bring me some good luck. There is this quote from Ovid in the book: “Let your hook always be cast. / In a pool where you least expect it, / there will be a fish.” I landed my first walleye and my friend landed a walleye and a perch—none whoppers, but all keepers. He taught me how to sex a walleye at a glance, pointing out that a male walleye will have a dark spot at the rear end of its dorsal fin and that the spot is particularly prominent on male walleye found in Lake Bemidji.

Any minute now

We were out there till seven o’clock. We sat in there with an intermittently working heater for six hours talking and listening to NPR and to the sounds of the lake ice. Due to water currents, changes in the temperature and pressure on the ice sheet it creaks and crackles and pops and thrums. At times it was pretty talkative that day. In the middle of all that we heard a shriek that we first thought was an early returning gull, but then the bird began to chitter, and I recognized it as the bald eagle’s call. We both poked our heads out of the fish house to see the bald eagle that had landed about hundred yards behind us. A large bird, it stood tall and beautiful against the snow.

Bald Eagle and empty Mountain Dew bottle

The sun drops and so does the temperature