The religion of solid ground while driving over lake ice on a sultry winter's day
If you find yourself in a car careening across the ice of a frozen lake this winter, you may do well to keep the door ajar, if just for the sake of the guy riding shotgun who yells, “Crack your door!”
It won’t save you when your 1982 Monte Carlo goes through the ice, though. Neither will rolling down your windows, I am told.
It’s cold outside and if you break through on your way to your favorite ice-fishing hole, you may as well drown in comfort with the heater on high.
When the guy in the middle of the bench seat, with his knees jammed against the dashboard and his stocking cap pulled down to his chin, starts whispering chants to a greater deity that sound like a repetitive hankering for Cheez-its, take heart. He’s not hungry. Just 20 minutes ago he ate three jalapeno corn dogs from the glass case at the Quick Mart where you stopped for bobbers, lead sinkers and maggots. And now, of all things forsaken by the ghosts of Elvis and Roy Orbison you’re suddenly way out here on the lake with the nose of the ’82 Monte Carlo pointed directly at a small dot that seems like a distant planet — or is it a moon? — in a cold, unfeeling universe.
The small square is an ice house. Others call it a fish house. Inside, anglers sit on cushions as they angle through holes quietly and without fuss.
It is a safe place, despite its great distance across a white surface of barren lake ice that someone proclaimed — was it the guy at the bar? — is thick enough for a bulldozer, and it is your destination.
The last land beacon, a lone white pine on a fading shoreline, is getting smaller, falling almost out of eyesight.
But thank God for the all-season radials, right? They speed you over the wind-blown surface of snow that separates the small dot and the chassis you occupy with two men in pack boots and mittens who pressed you into service.
“Let’s go fishing!” They exuberated earlier in the day, but their enthusiasm has waned with the sound of ice splitting.
Whether it is a lot of ice, or a thin layer of ice is being loudly contested by the psychedelic noises that emanate from underneath the car. They are the sound of the entire polar ice cap ripping apart, and the stereo can’t mask them. The sweet hum of the 305 V8 under the metallic green hood of the Monte can’t appease the wailing of ice that will inevitably break open like a maw and eat all of you, leaving nothing but steam where you’ve been, and a gaping hole full of cubes.
And then you feel them.
They are what ice fishermen collectively know as the jitters.
The jitters happen when you’ve been on the ice too long during a warm spell and you look around and realize all the other anglers are gone. The last pickup is leaving the parking lot on shore a quarter-mile away and around you, the crappies and bluegills you caught that morning float in 3 inches of water as the noon sun beats a straight path to glacial meltdown.
Your knees vibrate like a heavily insulated xylophone.
Jitters.
They come when the ice you’re walking on rises and falls like a water bed and your boots break through the top layer of junk ice and hit the layer underneath without much solace. The shore has become a temple of prayer where you will forever be grateful, once you reach it. You will no longer curse, you promise, and will tithe regularly, join the church choir and maybe even forsake sour cream and onion potato chips. Forever! Pleath, pleath, pleath!
Now, all of those deals you cut and failed to consummate have come to roost, haven’t they? With promises lying like empty Lay’s sour cream and onion wrappers at your feet you realize life has become one big, fat gotcha!
You press the gas and beeline toward Buggy’s fish house as the ice underneath the Monte howls and yowls and screams, and you unlatch and open your door just a little. You crack it. It won’t help. You know this, don’t you?
Nonetheless, you open the door just a little and the ice noise is louder, and the wheels go crunch, crunch and when you pull up beside Buggy’s ice house and step from the car the jitters fade. The whimpering of the men on the bench seat has been silenced by a sort of catharsis.
“Chickens,” you mouth.
Gathering the maggots, sinkers and bobbers from the dashboard you knock on the ice house door. It is winter somewhere in the middle of the frozen, North American continent. The sun is bright. Knock, knock, knock.
“Honey, we’re home.”
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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached by email at rbartholdt@cdapress.com