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The dog days of winter
Wild Side column: A trip to Lake of the Woods with cold days and warm friends
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WILLIAMS, Minn. — Cold is just a fact of life at the 49th parallel on Jan. 20, a perennial front-runner for coldest day of the year.
You put up with it to go ice fishing in Lake of the Woods.
As we lowered our lines into the lake, blowing snow scattered ice crystals throughout the frigid air, refracting dawn light into perfect sun dogs whose figurative barking complemented the literal howling of the wind.
The mercury bottomed out at 28 below, heading for a high that afternoon of 18 below. We stopped saying “minus” and “below zero” — superfluous when the forecast foresaw few if any positive temperatures.
The persistent cold thickened the ice from 26 to 28 inches during our four-day stay. The expanding ice heaved at pressure ridges, the grinding plates rumbling at times like the interior of a busy bowling alley.
We heated water on the liquid propane stoves in our shacks and poured it into the holes through which we fished to retard the formation of ice. Those of us who wore spectacles removed them before stepping out of the heated shacks into the lens-frosting chill.
Extreme cold exploits chinks in your clothing and instantly inflicts pain on exposed skin. Even the inured locals run from one warm spot to the next.
We hoped the polar front would not chill the bite and convinced ourselves that bottom-dwelling fish beneath 34 feet of water and 2 feet of ice know or care little about the air temperature or wind velocity above them.
Fish gonna do what a fish gotta do, which is eat minnows. They ignored ours much of the time, but each day plenty of them succumbed to our blandishments. As always we caught enough walleyes and saugers for fish fries on two of our four nights at Long Point Resort and enough to bring home our six-fish possession limits.
Catching those 12- to 19-inch fish is routine fun with thrills reserved for the occasional slot fish — walleyes from 19.5 to 28 inches long, the lake’s breeding stock, which must be released immediately.
To enhance those thrills, our crew — Jim Brace, Don Dutler, Doug Reck, Mike Stafford and Phil Steffen, all of Winthrop; Dean Baragary of Monti and Mike Mulnix and your correspondent, both of Quasqueton — always establishes a daily pool in which each of us puts in $5, the pot payable to the catcher of the day’s first slot fish.
Since no one had caught a slot fish in our six previous days on the lake (four last year and two the year before), the catcher of the first slot fish on Jan. 20, Mike Mulnix with a 19.75-inch specimen, collected $35 apiece from his fellow anglers.
My shack mate Jim Brace collected a $35 pot on the second day with a 23.5-inch walleye. Don Dutler’s 24-inch beauty took the third-day pot. Later that same day, with the pot empty, Dean Baragary checked a box on his bucket list with a 23.5 inch walleye. My 21-incher took the last day’s pot.
While we cleaned fish at the end of our first day, a Mississippian, on his first ice fishing trip to the north country fair, walked into the shed, his sonorous drawl announcing he wasn’t from around there.
Asked what he thought of the Jan. 20 weather at the 49th parallel, 1,200 miles north of his home, he said the bitter, potentially lethal cold was so far beyond his experience that he considered it a highlight of his trip.
His insight struck me personally. While I’d always thought I came year after year for the fishing and the enjoyment of time spent with good friends, it dawned on me that the malign climate and Siberianesque landscape were integral parts of the appeal.
Anyone who’s read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” knows that easy things get hard in extreme cold. There is something edgy and perversely thrilling about an environment that won’t tolerate mistakes.
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