During my spring break in mid-March I packed up the truck and headed north with my buddy Mike for some late Spring ice fishing. March can be the best time to ice fish. The days are long, the snow is melting, and as that meltwater trickles through the ice it tickles the whiskers of the fish, waking them from their winter torpor. Hungry and spring feverish, March crappies leap from the ice holes onto the laps of the fishermen sitting up top on their buckets. Or so an ice fisherman tells himself as he dreams about his spring trip north. But when he arrives up north, what he sees out on the lake is honeycombed, pocky, mottled, and puddled: A sheet of ice most unsafe. This, my friends, is the end of the season.
It’s a hard day when you have to hang up your ice bibs for the year. It takes a long time to get your mind around it. Instead of ice fishing, my three days up north are spent on cabin repair. It’s just not fair. But as we caulked the gaps in the old cabin’s battens, the sun shone, and Mike and I witnessed the spring miracle known as ice out. The warm wind gapped the north shoreline, and for two days we watched the open water march in dappled waves across the lake toward us. What had been a frozen landscape had suddenly become a watery one. Before we packed up to head south, I had my binocs out glassing mergansers. In the time it takes a lake to thaw, your mind, too, warms to the idea. Next trip north, I’ll be like those fish ducks out there, afloat.
