With the recent warm weather, my ice fishing window has closed for the year. Supposedly two inches of ice safely supports an adult male, but I won’t go out unless there is at least six.
I do not keep careful count, but I think that I’ve gone through the ice six times in my life. Only once did I think that I was in danger, and even that turned out to be a false alarm. It happened when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. During my junior year, I lived in a rundown house two miles from campus. One winter evening, tired and hungry after a night class, I decided that the quickest way home would be to cut across the ice on Lake Mendota. My usual land route curved around a corner of the lake, so I figured it would take less time if I eliminated the curve.
My icy shortcut was working well until, a quarter mile from shore, I came upon an unusually large expansion crack. I saw no open water, but one side of the crack was noticeably higher than the other. It ran in both directions for as far as I could see, so my only options were to cross over the obstacle or retrace my steps. I did not want to turn around, so I clumsily stepped up one side of the crack and down the other. Just as I thought I had made it over without incident, my boots broke through the snowy crust and immediately filled with water. I assumed I was falling into a patch of open water covered by snow, so I threw my upper torso forward and spread out my arms. Survival instinct was telling me that a dispersion of my body weight was the right thing to do.
As it turned out, I hadn’t broken through the main ice at all. Lake water had seeped through the expansion crack and created a shallow pool of water on top of the ice. A thin layer of new ice had formed on the surface of this pool, and it was this ice that I had broken through. I hadn’t fallen into Lake Mendota so much as fallen into a pool of water on top of Lake Mendota. After dropping knee-deep into a slushy mix of snow and water, my boots again found firm footing. Unfortunately, because I’d intentionally dove face-first into the cold, wet slurry, the front half of my body was wet. As soon I realized that I wasn’t going to die out on the lake, I picked myself up and ran home before hypothermia and frostbite could set in.
The Lake Mendota fiasco, however, is not my most vivid memory of breaking through ice. That recollection would go to the Wolf River Oxbow Incident. I was only ten years old. My uncle Bob and my cousin Tom had invited my dad and me to join them for a day of fishing on an oxbow of the Wolf River. It was late winter, and the ice right along shore had already melted. The ice out in the middle was still solid, but the challenge was getting out to it. One resourceful fisherman had hauled out a long 2” x 10” plank to span the open water, and we were able to use this makeshift bridge to reach good ice.
After a day of fishing, the four of us returned to the 2” x 10” to cross back over to land. For some reason, I had dawdled, so by the time I reached the plank, Tom was already on shore, Uncle Bob was in the process of crossing, and my dad was waiting for his turn. When I walked up to stand alongside my dad, our combined weight was too much for the ice to bear, and we both broke through. My dad went in up to his waist, I up to my chest. It was not until years later that Tom told me that his dad had ordered him not laugh in our faces, so he had ducked behind a tree so we couldn’t see him.
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This morning I was worried that I might not have anything to put into this week’s blog. NOT going ice fishing does not make for much of a story. However, just thinking about ice fishing reminded me of the various mishaps I’ve encountered on the ice. I came up with more anecdotes than fit into a single blog, so I will save a few for next week.
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