Any attempt to explain the fascination of an aspect of outdoor sport is subjective, difficult, and, by definition, probably futile. I don't believe that the macho aspect of ice fishing is the compelling ingredient in the stew. Rather, for me, it is the visual imagery. If the height of pleasure in outdoor pursuits is directly proportional to the simplicity and purity of the experience, then ice fishing definitely qualifies. You sit there, when there is snow on the ice, in a world of cold, pure whiteness, listening to the wind or the cry of migrating geese or the screeching of scavenging gulls, and the core of your very existence becomes the bright red tip of the wire strike indicator on the end of the rod. You are taken back to the times you spent as a child, watching the cork bobber with the worm or the grasshopper dangling underneath it in the mysterious depths of the pond, waiting with expectancy and unwavering faith, fully confident that the bobber would soon twitch, jiggle, and then dive beneath the surface.
On the ice, that bright bead at the end of the wire becomes your bobber, your world, your epicenter, your reason for being alive. And when it moves, you move, and underneath the ice the fish moves so that you feel it all the way through the rod into your soul. Some unspoken but very profound promise has been fulfilled. You have bridged the real and yet symbolic barrier embodied in the icecap, the frozen separation—a wall of aloofness almost like the lid of a coffin—between life above the ice and life below it. The pervasive death embodied by winter has been repelled or at least delayed. The inexorable drilling of the auger, or the pounding penetration of the ice spud, is like the wooden stake into the vampire's heart. There is life down there, and you have made a connection with it.
In his description of the ice-fishing fanatics he observed, Len Wright asked this rhetorical question: Were they the counterparts of the solitary and fishless fishermen on the Seine in Paris who are reputed to be getting away from their wives? Was there exhilaration in sheer survival?
No, Len, not entirely. There is exhilaration in survival, but also in defying the implied paralysis of winter, in mastery of a form of fishing that is, or can be, every bit as productive as being there in warmer times, when bass blast into a school of shad or trout gorge on a mayfly hatch.
When the icemen cometh, it's not just survival of the fittest. It's a triumph of the adaptable.
© Article copyright Pruett Publishing
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