Ice fishing. The sky’s the color of grungy nickels. The wind is picking up. A bottle is produced from the inside pocket of a wool hunting coat to ward off the morning chill.
I don’t condone drinking, especially before noon, but it does feel good to be irresponsible every once in a while. A quart of brandy is passed around and goes down like sugary turpentine. The morning tastes worse now, but gets a little brighter.
If you wonder why ice fishermen are always philosophizing, it’s because the slow days really are as unstimulating as you think. Nine a.m. now and we’ve covered work, the kids, the wives and girlfriends, the weather – it’s just a matter of time before the extrospection turns intro.
Below us hang tiny enticements designed to exploit a fishes primal urges; if the fish bites, he could die. Thanks to the brandy, it’s all a little surreal.
“Good thing we’re not fish,” someone says.
And yet the more I dwell on this, the more unsettling things become.
Writer Tom McGuane imagined that a fish confronted with a fisherman’s offering is sort of like an interstate motorist who sleepily notes a “Free Beer” sign at the mouth of an obscure off-ramp. Most would conclude that it’s an ambush, or at the very least suspect a catch was involved. Some – the really dumb ones – would disengage the cruise control and pull off.
It’s a comforting analogy in that we all fancy ourselves smarter than the dupes. But if we take some of the humor away and view the fisherman’s offering as any number of more common human vices, things hit a little closer to home. Who among us hasn’t made a bad decision related to a base behavior – especially in our teenage years? Fast food commercials troll through television programming at 10-minute intervals and many of us bite. Packs of cigarettes glint in storefront displays, invisible lines running all the way to Virginia.
I pause momentarily as the quart of brandy skids across the ice and comes to rest near my feet. A salutation is tossed jovially in my direction. Life is a strange mixture of hedonistic urges and self-preservation based restraint; on the ice, more the former. I uncap the brandy and swallow the hook deeply, noting as I do, the syrup glowing fishing-lure red against the gray February sky.
A flag now. A far one. Probably a hundred yards off. I start off at a sprint, fall flat on my back, then rise again and resume a more modest jog. Arriving, I note immediately that the fish is running. I set the hook and reverse her course. In 30 seconds or so, a fat largemouth squeezes through the hole and flops spastically on the ice.
There is nobility in her struggle. She is powerful in my hands, round and well-built with a belly full of eggs, her muscles straining as if her very life hung in the balance. I suppress her long enough to remove the hook and warn her to keep away from shiners with strings hanging from them. Then I offer her a second chance at life, praying as I do that when someday my own poor decision making leaves me gasping for air, perhaps I’ll be offered a similar courtesy.
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