If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? by Bill Heavey

Author:Bill Heavey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2007-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Cheers on the Ice

Past the vendors, I need my cell phone to locate Walleye Dan, a local guide who has invited me to fish with his family and friends. He offers me a folding chair, and I skim the ice out of my hole and hook a fathead through the tail. When the noon starter gun sounds, I open the bail and let it fall 42 feet, then crank the reel up a turn.

Within 30 seconds, a strange transformation steals over the crowd. The raucous party atmosphere is gone, replaced by the collective concentration of thousands of anglers, whose consciousness has suddenly narrowed to the 8-inch holes at their feet. Walleye Dan, whose real name is Dan Eigen, has told me to bump my bait against the bottom a couple of times to make the mud puff, then raise it up a foot and give it a jiggle every so often. This is pretty much what every other angler out here is doing, in depths from 15 to 70 feet. The fish, beneficiaries of the most monumental and simultaneous air drop of food since last year, must be stunned. For long minutes, the crowd remains quiet. Then a cheer goes up about 100 yards away, and a man with both hands over his head can be seen lumbering slowly in the direction of the weigh-in station.

Walleye Dan has been ice fishing so many years that he thinks nothing of clearing his hole with his bare hand if a skimmer isn’t within arm’s reach. Then he nonchalantly shakes the hand in the frigid air, the droplets turning to ice even before they reach the ground. His fingernails are cracked and smashed down to the quick from the endless freeze-and-thaw cycles. He hardly seems to notice and asks his wife, Shelley, for another caffeinated soda so that he may further restrict the blood flow to his extremities. He has three children, all of whom are still too intelligent to be out here. Dan meets with more success than most festival participants. In 14 years, he says, he has caught five fish.

We sit on this endless plain of ice, looking like a nomadic herd of anglers who have momentarily stopped and turned our backs to the wind, trying to gather fish before moving on to the next lake. I watch a guy who evidently cannot locate his party. He picks up a snow shovel from his sled, methodically packs up a mound 2 feet high, and climbs it like a watchtower, lord of all he surveys. Not seeing his friends, he climbs down and resumes fishing.

Another man not 10 yards from me has been down on the same knee for half an hour, jigging his bait every 20 seconds. A boy, evidently his son, sits in a folding chair a few feet away and periodically reels up to recharge his glow-bait with a blue penlight, then drops it back to the bottom. The father disregards the commotion around him: somebody jogging by in

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