Neal Karlen - Farallon Films

	The Iceman Fisheth by Neal Karlen

	When my grandfather died I inherited two things from his estate: a 1940s Electrolux vacuum cleaner and a pair of Sorel ice fishing boots. The first and only time I plugged in the vacuum, it emitted a torrent of smoke and sparks reminiscent of the rejuvenation scene in Frankenstein, when the mad scientist puts his bolt-necked creation through the roof of his laboratory and straight into an electrical storm. I hit karmic gold, however, when I slipped on the ancient Arctic footwear my grandfather had worn for decades, ice fishing at four in the morning inside a tiny shack enveloped by wind-chills that could reach 60 below zero. These boots, I realized immediately, were the true essence of the man, an immigrant with the thick knuckles of a lifelong laborer who never learned English, but could read the mysteries of a Minnesota lake bottom like a master cryptologist. He was alone in these gift-from-God skills, but not in his passion. Last year, 115,000 permits were issued for ice-fishing houses, shacks usually so tiny that they hold only enough room for a small portable heater and four anglers sitting numbly knee to knee on upturned buckets. That piece of Hollywood-ized tripe known as Grumpy Old Men got a few things accurately: whole towns spring up overnight when the lakes freeze to a depth of four inches, thick enough for a 200 pound person to safely walk on and dig a hole with either a manual or motorized ice auger, both of which look like corkscrews imported from Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnag. People can drive cars onto the lakes when the ice depth reaches a foot, at which point the winter villages acquire road signs, trash pickup, speed limits, towing services, and plowed streets for easy delivery of pizza ordered via cell phone. The largest such encampment is at Mille Lacs Lake, near the Canadian border, with more than 5,000 ice houses holding an estimated 20,000 people -- a population greater than that of 90 percent of Minnesota's towns. It's a weird, eerie world. At dawn, on the kind of cold Minnesota winter when your glasses seem super-glued to your head and your nostril hairs freeze, the shacks look like post-apocalyptic Hoovervilles-on-ice. Many ice fisherman, however, prefer to travel by themselves to wherever they think the fish might be. Not even bothering with the protection of a shack, they walk or drive right onto one of the state's 15,000 lakes, dig a hole, and do battle with northern pike, bass, sunfish and crappie. Pronounced crop'-ee, the crappie, despite its unfortunate nomenclature, puts up one of the best fights in fishing and tastes swell too, just watch out for the bones. My last time ice fishing, my late grandfather's boots saved me a shred of dignity a quarter century after he'd died. I'd done a goofy newspaper article on the lightness and general fabulosity of the latest lines of synthetic winter sportswear and had been rewarded with the expensive swag purchased by the publication, clothing I'd never buy for myself in a google years. So there was a part of me that thought I deserved the derision when I went to Lake Minnetonka with my father and his gaggle of grumpy old ice fishing buddies, and they started making fun of my blindingly bright, state-of-the-art, all light-and-polyester winter wear. Respecting my elders, I made no mention of how their prototypical ice-fishing outfits made them look mummified in untold layers of drab wool dating, as the vaudeville saw goes, from when the Dead Sea was only slightly sick. "Good boots though," admired Abe "the Mavin" Schwartz, 78, the dean of local ice fisherman as well as the best pool and pinochle player at the local VFW. "It ain't bragging, if you can do it," Abe says about his nickname, which means "expert" in Yiddish and is emblazoned on his vanity license plates. He looked closely at my boots again, and talked to me for the first time like I wasn't an utter nitwit. "Those are the boots of a man who knows ice fishing isn't a sport", he said, "but a punishment!" Still, there I was, looking like an extra from Plan 9 From Outer Space, as the guys began their critique from the top, with my combination wool-plastic-Heidi-looking hat from some fancy designer called "Dale of Norway." Moving on down, they ridiculed my Dr. Spock peace-be-with-you three fingered lobster gloves, hoo-haahed when I showed them my featherweight Capilene long underwear, and were singularly unimpressed by the Gore-Tex socks sticking out of my grandfather's boots. I'd been assured by the saleswoman that my socks were so remarkably waterproof that I could stand in a bathtub full of water and not get my feet wet. Huddled inside our ice shack, I slipped off a Sorel boot and thought she better be right as I stuck my foot in the water churning up through the hole in the ice. If she wasn't, I would never dance again. I listened for my own scream, but it never came. The socks worked. But does it even matter? Superficially, the point of all this is to yank fish out of a ten-inch hole cut through two-foot thick Minnesota lake ice. Existentially, it's the Nordic kin of the purification ritual of the Native American sweat lodge, except it's 60 degrees below instead of 250 above. Personally, the best time for my father and I to get real and serious with each other is when we're alone in these pre-dawn iceboxes, staring out the window at a world that looks like a vast, foreboding moonscape. Big news and family secrets seem to pour out: I always hope my life's momentous events take place during Minnesota's five-month winter. If I'm getting divorced, or married, or engaged, am moving from Minneapolis or moving back to Minneapolis, I usually tell him in the ice house. He takes news of change better there. The biggest "what if?" in the life of this usually emotionally unrevealing man came out one morning as we angled alone atop ice buckets. Once, he told me, he'd actually decided to leave Minneapolis for good. The army had rushed him through medical school so he could be among the first waves of Americans to hit the mainland in the expected invasion of Japan towards the end of World War II. Instead, Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and the Occupation Army assigned the 21-year old doctor to run a leper colony and a free clinic for starving Japanese on Okinawa. During that time, he fell in love with Japan (my mother, who he married years later, also claims that Japanese women spoiled him forever with their kindness). When his tour of duty was up, he and another young doctor decided to stay in Japan and open their own clinic. He sent this news home to my grandparents and a telegram, probably the only one my grandfather sent his whole life, rocketed back. All it said was: COME HOME BUM. So he did. Now, several years after that revelation, he and his tough old friends in their woolens toted up how much my new ice fishing outfit cost. With that figure, they estimated they could buy a new fish shack, a portable ice auger for drilling holes, and enough bait minnows to last until the third millenium. A few hours later, the painful results were in. Abe Schwartz had caught 13 healthy-sized sunfish, my father 7. Lying on the ice was my sole catch, a puny sunny, lighter even then my Gore-Tex socks. "Warm enough?" Abe asked me, laughing. And then he looked down at my feet. "Nice boots though. Those'll keep you out of trouble. Where'd you get them?" Neal Karlen is writing a book about the Kabbalah and his (sort of) return to Judaism, which will be published by Simon and Schuster in September 2002. © MMI. Neal Karlen. All rights reserved. [odds & sods] [home]