by Jim Harrison
There is nothing inscrutable about the matter of violation. I fancy myself an amateur naturalist and have hot flashes when I think of the sins of my past, harmless and usual though they may be. I think of the large brown trout I caught at age twelve by illegal set line in the Muskegon River. Turtles had eaten all but its head by the time I pulled the line in. I nailed the head to the barn alongside my pike and bass skulls as if I had caught the fish by fair means. Or the roosting grouse stalked and shot with a .22. Or diving into a lake for weeks on end with a knife, handle in mouth, to carve the heads off turtles we flushed from logs. We thought they were killing our fish. Or shooting crows. Or shooting at deer in midsummer with bow and arrow, though I don't remember ever coming close. All the mindless sins of youth committed in the haze of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood, Jack London and Ernest Seton; wanting to be a steely half-breed Robert Mitchum type with hatchet, revolver, cartridge belt and a long mane of hair trained with bear grease.
Gentle reader, rules will never stop the jacklighter and snagger, the violator. It is not so much that enforcement of the law is inept, but that respect for the spirit of the law is insufficient. And in Michigan there are fabulous ironies; a portion of any fine for a game violation is earmarked as “restitution to the state.” But you might well be shining your deer in an opening in a forest that has been ravaged by the oil interests—public land doled away for peanuts by conservationists in a state with boggling population and recreation problems. Or you might get caught snagging a trout in Manistee Lake where a paper company belches out thousands of gallons of fluid waste daily into public waters so rank that a motorboat scarcely can manage a wake. Who is violating what? Or as René Char said, “Who stands on the gangplank directing operations? The captain or—the rats?” Not a very subtle distinction, hereabouts. The problems seem, and perhaps are, insuperable. The political-business-conservation relationship in Michigan often reminds one of old-style Boston politics; everyone gets a piece of the action but the pie itself suffers from terminal rot. Of course, this is ho-hum stuff now. Pollution is “in committee” everywhere and government is firming up its stand, à la kumquat jelly, with a lid of yellow paraffin. I have a dreamy plot afoot for a court test to be decided on Saturn wherein the Constitution and Bill of Rights would be made to apply to fish and mammals.
Finally, it is a very strange arrogance in man that enables him to chase the last of the whales around the ocean for profit, shoot polar bear cubs for trophies, allow Count Blah-Blah to blast 885 pheasants in one day. It is much too designed to be called crazy or impetuous.
Those lines of Robert Duncan's about Robin Hood come back to me now: “How we loved him / in childhood and hoped to abide by his code / that took life as its law!” The key word here is “code.” Sport must be sporting. We have a strong tendency to act the weasel in the hen house. At dawn not a single cluck was heard. It might be preposterous to think we will change, but there are signs. Judges are becoming sterner and people are aware of environmental problems to a degree not known in this country before. Game wardens get more cooperation from the ordinary citizen than they used to. Violating is losing its aura of rube cuteness.
The true violator, though, will persist in all of his pathological glory. Even if there were no game left on earth, something would be devised. Maybe a new sport on this order: ganghooking Farmer Brown's pigs. A high-speed power winch mounted on a vehicle hood is required, and a harpoon with large hooks. You shoot the harpoon over the pig's back and press the winch button. Zap! You've got yourself a squealer. Precautions: make sure Farmer Brown is away for the day, and take your finger off the winch button in time or the pork will really fly.
1971
Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport A Michigan Journal
There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun.
—BOB SERVICE
We're not actually that far north. Yes, a small church in the Upper Peninsula had a Blessing of the Snowmobiles, and not a trace of irony was noticed. But the sense of the Arctic does pull on us; days shorten, men mumble, the euchre games at the tavern grow extended and violent. There is much talk in December and January of just when the bay will freeze over. It is the west arm of the Grand Traverse Bay they are talking about, a very grand bay indeed, containing some five by thirty miles of Lake Michigan's water. The east arm (they are separated by the forefinger of Old Mission Peninsula) usually freezes first, but the lake trout there, for unknown reasons, run smaller. Some years the bay doesn't freeze, but this is rare. And some years an oil tanker is brought in at an inopportune time, say if there is a steady offshore wind and a warming trend, and the ice breaks up and blows out of the bay. Until February 14, the date on which the ice is usually safe, sportsmen must be content to fish on smaller lakes for perch or crappies, or some of them take up the ancient art of pike spearing. But these activities locally are only considered as warm-ups. On inland lakes, many consider these forms of ice fishing adequate and cases are made for chugging bluegills with corn borers, a small obnoxious worm found in cornstalks. Houghton Lake, a resort area drawing much of its traffic from Hamtramck and other posh Detroit suburbs, throws a gala every winter known as Tip-Up Town, the “tip-up” referring, of course, to the crude rig positioned above the hole in the ice.
Years ago, when I was a temporary prisoner on Long Island and dreamed of a return to Trout Country, I thought of those hallowed winter nights that resemble Christmas cards, with large jeweled flakes of snow falling softly on humble farm animals and peasant faces upturned in wonderment and looking not a little bit like my relatives. But reality is a different pudding. BRAAAOOWILL is what we have, my transcription of what is called a snow-mobile “safari.” Safari is when a dozen or so machines strike out in the night cross-country for another tavern. Let's have it once more: BRAAAOOWILL, as if a dozen burly chain saws were mating under a single tympanum cowl.
Walking out on any large expanse of ice has always been dramatic to me. After not many steps I tend to stumble involuntarily, as if I were an exhausted survivor of the Byrd Expedition. I frankly expect seals or polar bears, perhaps a wolf loping along the farther shore. But if I fall and roll over I can maybe see a 1969 Camaro passing on the road or a guy and gal in his ‘n’ her purple satin overall suits just cattin’ around on their throaty Skidoo. This brings me swiftly back to reality. Here are a few reality facts from the Great North: our unemployment rate this year is sixteen percent, giving many some much unwanted time off; snowmobiles, mobile homes and motels each outnumber the total population in 1977; most of my friends are unemployed and if I did have any money they would try to borrow it! I am led, though, by many people I meet to believe that they are mainly worried about the Communist Threat and how the “radicals are tearing apart the country.” They tell me that they “worked for what they got” and “nobody gave them nothing.” In periods of high unemployment the Great Depression again becomes a ruling fact of life. Yet many people up here strike me as more populist than conservative, and there is the kind of generalized suspicion of Big Government that one finds in non-urban Arizona. They are angry at Nixon for selling them that 1952 Buick, but then they hated Johnson, who is still blamed for everything but the tight-money policy, which is especially hard on a resort area, the only other large local industry being a state insane asylum.
Oh boy! I have been invited to go ice fishing by two of my friends, Richard Plamondon, who is a bartender, and Pat Paton, a carpenter and machinist and block layer. As I dress before dawn, I feel somehow patriotic wearing Air Force surplus arctic balloon boots and bib overalls over other trousers and thermal underwear and various sweaters and a goosedown vest and an outsized quilted coat from when I weighed 22s pounds. Eighteen articles of clothing in all, and when I got out of my car I found I could scarcely walk. I fell on the slippery ice with padded impunity, a big helpless doll of a trout slayer. The early morning air was bluish with cold, and as I waddled along I thought of the promised steak to come in the a
fternoon and the whiskey I would use to wash it down. But there I was being asked to spud some holes in the ice. One cannot refuse. Chores are shared. Pat and Richard were organizing the chuggers and tip-ups. Everyone spuds their own holes, a rule of the Big Ice. I felt the spud was too heavy after only a few chops. I wanted the ice to be very thick for my safety but thin for the spudding. It became apparent that we could have fished from the security of a railroad car. Over a foot thick, and I was wheezing and steaming and my shoulder ached. I knew then why construction workers liked the sport: they were able to spud the holes. Anyway, Richard tested the depth: 170 feet. A lot of dark down there. I peered in the hole and saw the reflection of a moon face, my own. Richard set a tip-up for me and told me to spud another hole to chug in. I couldn't believe it. I thought, whatever happened to the tradition of the gun bearer who in this case might be put to work, or some sallow, nasty teenager might be brought along for a pittance. But I spudded on. Finally I attached a Swedish pimple (surely the most elegant name for a bait) to a line, dropped it to the bottom, raised it five feet as instructed by Pat and Richard, who watched my motions critically, and began chugging. Sort of ghastly. No question about it. I had become a Chugger! A brutish act, and it was so cold except for my toasty feet in their big white warmonger boots.
Within an hour I had eaten both my sandwiches, roast beef with thick slices of onion. I had also begun drinking my apple wine. After the second bottle I felt quite happy. I was probably cold but I couldn't feel it. The ice had become a mattress against which I snuggled prone, still chugging. No nibbles. Then Richard's tip-up flag went up and we ran over to the hole. He let the spool run freely for a minute to make sure the fish swallowed the minnow, somewhat similar to the way you hook a sail or a marlin. But not too similar. Pat contended that the fish was large, as only a large fish made a long run. I watched the red plastic spool steadily unwind until Richard picked it up and lightly reefed the line. Then he began to slowly draw it in hand over hand as if he were retrieving an anchor or a used kite. I was jealous. Why didn't my flag go up? Perhaps I wasn't “living right,” as they say. Richard was gaining steadily on the fish. He announced laconically that it wasn't large. We stood peering down the twelve-inch hole until, shockingly, a trout popped out with the tail of a minnow sticking out of its mouth. Then, horrors! It flopped on the ice and gave off a prolonged BELCH!, a sort of berserk flatulence. I was deeply shocked.
“That pressure sure gets to them,” said Pat sagely.
“You're not just a _____,” replied Richard.
The point was that the fish had been pulled up precipitously from 170 feet and the variance in pressure was explosive in a minor sense, somewhat like the gas released by a semi-impacted bucking bronco at a rodeo. The trout weighed about three pounds, a good eating size. His eyes bulged and quivered in utter defeat, the ultimate tummyache and bends. I went back to my chugging hole after breaking up the thin ice that had gathered in the cold around my tip-up. I wanted to catch a fish and bring it home so that my daughter wouldn't peer over the top of her Wonder Woman comic and say, “You didn't catch any!” and my wife wouldn't ponder, “Did he go to a bar and play pool or did he really go fishing?” To no avail did I chug until I got tennis elbow. I grew bored and cold and began playfully throwing chunks of ice at Pat and Richard. They were not amused.
We finally quit by mid-afternoon and drove to a restaurant where the waitress giggled extravagantly over my balloon boots.
“Are your feet that big?” she asked.
“I'm an American Ice Fisherman, bring me a drink,” I shouted wittily. The jukebox was playing a merry polka.
When she brought the drinks she rolled her eyes again at my feet. I told her then that I was a veteran of many polar expeditions and had tracked the wily seal to his air-conditioned lair. She asked if seal meat was good and I said yes if they take the ball off their noses har har har. Richard and Pat were sullen as the pretty waitress wasn't interested in them but in my feet. Tuff, I said. So it goes, this sport of the north, fit mostly for the hardy unemployed, those who dare thin ice with their snowmobiles and often plunge (eight last year) to a gurgly death amidst the very fishes they sought with pimples and corn borers, red worms and dead smelt (two for a quarter).
A few days later I got a call from Richard saying that a group of locals were going out the next morning and I could meet them on Route 22 about 300 yards south of Chervenko's Rung & Bung Works (coopers to the fruit-orchard trade). I was several hours late due to sloth and invented errands. I spotted them with my binoculars a mile or so out on the ice. But farther up the bay a Coast Guard icebreaker was leading in a tanker with a rather eerie succession of resounding crashes, like hearing a battle from a distance. The ships were well beyond the fishermen, but I decided that the ice looked a trifle soft. Definitely unsafe. Perhaps I would go home and treat myself to an extended nap.
I began to think of ice fishing in the old days. It is, after all, no modern invention. I have a Currier and Ives print of some pilgrim types hauling shad from the ice. In the 1930s great cities of ice shanties were erected on large northern lakes. Even electricity was available. Recently I was in Minnesota, a state that along with Wisconsin can readily be confused with Michigan, chauvinists notwithstanding. In St. Paul an old-timer told me many yarns. He said that entire cottages especially built for the purpose on skids are pulled onto the ice by diesel tractors. From the comfort of kitchen, bedroom and the living room the fabled walleye is fished for. Imagine your own living room with a big hole in the floor. You're lolling in an easy chair fishing through the hole, with a couple of lunker walleyes on the floor beside you. Maybe you have the TV on, and Jack Nicklaus is grinning his Ohio grin on an eighteenth green somewhere. You will cook the walleyes for dinner. They taste better than any fish I've eaten, better than mountain cutthroat, Dover sole, swordfish, lake trout or pompano or lungfish. Perhaps Myrna in her tattersall negligee is bringing you a cold one or just plain Mom is across the room knitting. It is imperative for obvious reasons to have your cottage dragged off the ice before it thaws. I might add that the “walleye” got its name from its particularly weird stare, but then you don't have to eat the eyes.
In my own “old days” we knew none of these sybaritic pleasures. I suspect my father thought if comfort were involved it wasn't sporting. So we would get up before dawn, drive out through the snowdrifts along a logging road and fish all day long in the bitterest cold for a mess of bluegills and perch. Nothing sentimental here. It appeared fun because it was supposed to be fun. Kids are doggish, and if you say, “Come kids, let's pick the dump,” they will jump at the chance.
Earlier in January I sat with Richard for three days in his shanty on Lake Leelanau looking down through a hole at a foot-long live sucker minnow dangling from a line. The shanty is kept totally dark. The hole in the ice for spearing is usually about three feet square. The visibility is amazing—a window on the freshwater netherworld, which, though the life doesn't compete with the multitudinous saltwater variety, is nonetheless a lot better than staying home and waiting for winter to go away. Anyway, the sucker minnow was supposed to attract the great northern pike, or Mister Big Teeth as he is known in some quarters. When the imaginary pike drifted into our rectangle of vision for a sucker supper, the spear would be thrown at him. The spear was somewhat larger and certainly more cumbersome than the tuna harpoons used off Gloucester and Block Island. Poor pike. But only one appeared in the three days and we were caught unawares, and when Richard lunged with the spear the pike was driven against the bottom and squiggled out between the spear tines. So much for pike spearing, which is in danger of being outlawed. But it was pleasant sitting there in the dark shanty, warm with a propane stove and copious supplies of food and drink.
We would occasionally chug for perch with small minnows while we watched our decoy. In addition to the meat of the fish, perch roe lightly fried in butter is delicious. I suspect that it is healthy, too, though I have no evidence. But some I know who eat
it are huge, a trifle fat, in fact, and can drink fifty glasses of draft beer in an evening. It's never boring in an ice shanty. You talk idly while your head sweats and your feet freeze. There is all the husky camaraderie of the locker room. A sample:
“Do you know that girl in Sutton's Bay? You know the one I mean.”
“Yup.”
“Well I would _____ _____ _____.”
“She's built like a rain barrel.”
“Pass the wine.”
I would like to make an elementary contention here about expediency and sport. In this locale, winter begins in October and runs unremittingly until the end of March. My friends in warmer climes won't believe we had sixteen and a half feet of snow this year. After a while you no longer believe there's any earth left under the snow. The ground is a fib. It was still possible to fish on the part of the bay nearest Traverse City in early April. In fact, a large school of young coho salmon running between two and three pounds were discovered in the shoal water near the power plant. A healthy adult with an interest in the outdoors has to do something during these five months. The snow is almost immediately too deep for rabbit hunting—the beagles flounder on their short legs. Even an instinctively arch and lazy whiner like myself doesn't want to spend the entire winter looking out the window dreaming of Cozumel, Cabeza de Vaca, Belize. And you worry too much: a night when it is below zero and the wind off Lake Michigan is at forty knots and the car is buried in snow, and you count and time the weird thunks and squealings from the furnace, which inevitably breaks down. The weather seems to lose its threat when you spend time out in it, and if you're not geared temperamentally to skiing or snowmobiling, you're left with nothing to do but fish.