View from the North 40: I've done my stint with the fishes

I don’t ice fish. I don’t enjoy winter enough to stand on ice watching a bobber do nothing, and I’m not a good enough drinker to sit in an ice house trying to drink that bobber under the water table.

Dad used to take us ice fishing when we were kids. I don’t know how he and Mom thought it was worth it. I guess they didn’t know any better.

The day started well before dawn, especially the times we were taking the snowmobile into a snowed-in lake. Dad, Mom, Brother and I would be crammed into the pickup, four-across on the bench seat, all of us bundled up in long-johns, snowsuits and insulated boots with our knit hats, mittens and scarves heaped on our laps — my brother and I silently battling for whose elbow and shoulder got to lie against the seatback and who had to sit cockeyed with one arm forward.

Dad would drive us to the staging area where he’d unload the sled and snowmobile — a brute of a machine that hauled all of us.

With the sled hitched to the snowmobile, my brother and I would get stacked together in the bottom of the sled with a cooler of food, thermoses, fishing gear and assorted necessities piled on and around us. Lastly, a canvas tarp would get tied over the heap of us. My parents would load themselves onto the machine itself then we’d get drug off into the snowy, tree-lined darkness. Backward, just to ensure I was really disoriented.

By the time the sun rose above the mountains, we would be encamped on a remote lake, campfire burning, holes drilled through the ice — with a manual auger — and each of us set up with our little poles and a hot drink, to sit on the ice and wait. And sit. And wait. And sit some more. Waiting and watching for the bobber to bob.

Not noticing the cold creeping past the winter wear and boredom.

Eventually, I would ditch the sitting and put my ice skates on to cruise around the ice, racing, spinning and crashing to add a few bruises and an ice rash or two to my perpetual dings resulting form a childhood lived outdoors. Sometimes I would poke at the fire, or actually be useful by gathering branches to burn, or play with the other kids if other families had come along, or play with the dog if she got to come along, or eat, or complain because my feet were cold.

Inevitably, I would keep going back to my hole in the ice, trying to catch a fish. Inevitably, though, I would be skunked. Skunked, that is, until lunch was eaten, the sun was sinking close to the mountaintops again and the adults were talking about packing up.

By then I would be laying on the ice, staring through my hole in the ice and talking to the fish hidden in the wintery black water.

“I hate fish. I don’t even want to catch a fish, I hate them so much. If I did catch a fish, I’d toss it onto the ice and leave it. I wouldn’t send it back to its home and I wouldn’t take it to mine. You’re not even worth the effort, really. Fish are stupid. I really do hate fish. You don’t even taste good. I really hope I don’t catch any of you.”

As if reverse psychology worked on fish.

Well, actually, it did.

Sprawled on the ice at the end of the day, I’d haul in a fish or four, always the last to pull up my line, always willing to get in the last insult in case it meant one more fish on my hook.

All I remember of the trip back to the pickup, every time, is shivering uncontrollably in the dark with the cold air and snow kicked up by the snow machine’s tracks driving a chill deeper into my muscles and bones. I was sure I would freeze to death before we got home.

Not once did those trout ever taste as good as that truck heater felt, blasting hot air on me until I almost smothered in the thick heat.

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If only those mountain lakes had been stocked with lobster and melted butter at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .