The Fishing Hole

The ice had me from the first, whether it was fishing for the lunkers, up under the cut banks of Meadow Creek, or trolling with giant 'Ford Fender' lures behind an aluminum boat with a ten horse outboard motor, on Rocky Lake or Big Lake, or ramming holes through the winter lake ice with a 6 foot steel bar...

In the days I was a boy, there weren't the niceties of gas powered ice augurs and snow mobiles. I wasn't a big boy either, just a sawed off runt with skinny little boy ribs...why, I wouldn't have made a meal...but you couldn't keep me from a line and a pole, and I would pack that heavy ass ice pick out there on that frozen lake and begin the arduous task of hacking away at the glass beneath my bunny boots.

The snot would fairly run down my face, and I would swipe it with my huge snow mitten and rub it on my parka, over and over again. I would grow sweaty, even well below freezing, and would discard the parka, on the ice. A hole of continually diminishing diameter appeared in the glass ice, down 2 feet, down 3, finally, I would break through to frozen water...at 4 feet...enough to roll a truck onto...

Now, that's what I call, a fishing hole...and often I would make the dear mistake of grabbing the ice bar with a bare hand.  No no...don't do that...on a frozen day on a frozen lake...and I would burn and curse, and lose a couple layers of kid flesh against that steel. Those are the karmic debt this kid owed the ice, for I was the family fisherman, the one obsessed...

The sun, at 30 degrees, was blinding...at 10 degrees above horizon, I would don my coat again and tramp in circles, to stay warm, the circulation going, and the wind would steal across the lake, around my legs, and I would feel the night coming...yet, I fished, and little fry and large, lay there upon the ice, all frozen stiff, and salmon roe and blood...coloring the spots of snow...

Then...just before twilight...and the real cold...bite...I would head in, with visions in my mind, of hot cocoa and maybe something mom baked...in the old Queen stove...dragging my stinking booty, of little fish...that did their duty...and died. I would clean them at the wood porch...we would say our grace and eat them fresh...clothes smelling of salmon roe..and wind...and oxygenated air...

And I was the fisherman...and dad...the hunter...mom...the maker...sis...the growler of the bones...and brother...breaker...at the bounds...and leaver, and we missed him so...yet, life went on, the sky...the ice...the stars...the dancing rainbow ribbon...of aurora borealis...roamed upon the night...to our delight...and everlasting passion...


Written by Bruce James Clyde 2015

Photo: Frozen Alaska Lake, photographer unknown