Rivers Cannot Run Frozen

Ice-fishing is in my blood.  Sure, I won't claim to be a savant at it and frankly, I am not even sure if one can call it a sport--basically it has a skill set of sitting, staring into a holed-watery darkness and forgetting about wind while exposed to bitter temperatures.  And what keeps you there? The simple hope a sleepy pike will surface on your baited-iced metal hook.  Regardless if it is a true sport or not, I do know this--ice fishing is not for the faint at heart.  And speaking of hearts, ice fishing represents everything I believe about love, a mix of slow-baited calculated luck with the capacity to believe in what you cannot always see.

My father and I would ice fish in mid-February when the ice would turn cerulean blue. We would talk about the ice of December and January as if we knew the temptations of first freezes. Early ice would draw us in, perfectly smooth and begging to be ice-skated on and explored under a fat-full moon shining deep into the bottom of School Lake.  Even as a kid, I knew that kind of ice was risky, that kind of quick perfection easily breaks.  The sort of love that comes up on you so fast and glossy, you forget about any sense of danger.  The kind of love that can leave you on a street in a foreign country, outside a tram with no ticket, so you find yourself walking all the way back, home.  Trying to forget the perfect French he spoke.

And even late March and early April ice has risks as well.  The kind of ice that has been layered, broken, reformed and then layered again and what remains is only white. A shade of white for so long you have forgotten about the color green.  When you live where you can ice fish, you likely live where winter lasts for more than half a year, long enough for one to only faintly remember the taste of a fresh cherry, a summered peach.  Late winter ice is different in risks, but still not ideal.  Sure, it has had more time to build, or endure but the cracks run deeper.  The way love that has been broken for too long cannot hold, bad habits formed into patterns make it so much harder to re-build, the risks so much greater to take.  Need I give an example, or how about two words? bitter break-up. Or one, divorce.

And perhaps the worst sort of ice of all is aptly called, winterkill.  Winterkill occurs during especially long, harsh winters.  Fish will die in late winter, but may not be noticed until a month after the ice leaves the lake because the dead fish are temporarily preserved by the cold water.  Fish will actually suffocate from lack of dissolved oxygen and float to the surface under a thin layer of ice.  The kind of love that goes deep into your skin, beyond your rational mind and further into your murky kept soul.  That kind of love that you surface from months later wondering where you have been and found outstretched in your bed sideways.  Mouth open and breathless.  You awake in the dark of night wondering what parts of yourself you have compromised, gave up on and maybe even froze?  The kind of love some people don't ever really recover from.  Love that only leaves loss.

But February ice when winter is still fresh in our cheeks and more light slowly begins and ends our days is the ideal month for ice fishing.  A great time for love.  For someone like myself who finds herself attracted to men born above the 45th parallel, I need a man who loves winter.  Winter is a time to be outside bundled, active in snow and exposed to all that can remind us of being more animal than mind.

Plus, ice fishing is about dressing warm and being practical, no one really has stylish outfits for the "sport", unless you think dressing in a full-bodied Carhartt is sexy.  (Personally, my dad always looked like a teddy bear, which is endearing for sure.)  You sit on white buckets, use tools that look and sound more Inuit than anything, auger and gaff, and more time is spent waiting and being still than being crafty and calculated.  And, you have no idea if the fish are even there.  You have to just wait. You have to have enough hope in something that you cannot even see or even know if it will arrive.

So really, aren't those better tips for finding love than dressing yourself up and crafting yourself into someone you're not? Calculating risks and putting yourself to the whims of okcupid.com, POF.com (plenty of fish) for the logarithms of love? (True story, a good friend of mine recently went ice fishing with her boyfriend and came back engaged.)  Don't under estimate the romance in the sport.

I must admit, it has been too long since I have been ice-fishing.  Perhaps I am too shy to ask anyone to go with me.  Maybe I am just out of practice.  But this past weekend, I went with two couples skate skiing and while driving up to Seeley Lake, I caught a glimpse of some ice fisherman on an early morning Sunday, already seated by their tip-ups and waiting with faces in the morning sun.  Later after skiing, we went to a bar named Trixie's in a town called Ovando.  I thought I had fallen in love, with Montana yet again.  Late bright sun coming through the bar's windows, fries on a plate, elk on the walls and Merle Haggard on the jukebox.  Ms. Pac-man in the corner wasn't even dusty, the whiskey with ginger tasted just cold enough and the overweight dog smiling for scrapes inside leaned into my legs.

It was the kind of place you find close to a frozen lake for ice fishing.  A bar that serves good food and appears run down just enough, potentially forgotten and not locatable on anyone's i-phone.  Which seems like the best kind of place to think about love.  To think about no matter how run down, how much wintering your heart has had or been exposed to, you have to believe in what you cannot see.  Believe that bar in the middle of nowhere by a frozen lake full of pike is just where you need to be. Just where you need to be to believe in love, after love.

Enjoy.

Tits and Fish                                                                                                           

I envy the leaves, anything that dies

with the shade of vermillion on its skin.

The color of shorts you swim in

every summer at Pelican lake, the lake

rusting rocks and lichen. You scramble up

granite, naked enough, your toes clutched

to the edge before you release and fall, a half flap

in your weightlessness. The weight I used to feel

on me as we lay on my wood floor,

our lips hooked in the early hours of a day

we never wished to rise. Our bodies, flat

and floatless under water, nestled like large mouth

bass in tire shade and weed bed. We’d sleep

out the heat, hide until caddis hatch circled

and surfaced, to mate and leave, full enough

of each other to die. You wait for these flies

at dusk to know where the bronzeback

will bite in the early morning, alone in your metal boated

Minnesota, the state I see as holed

from an airplane. Minnesota is just a word

that sinks in my mouth and sits stale like alewive

belly up in a bucket. I remember you forgot

to put the minnows in water

and the father yelled “tits up” at breakfast.

But each dawn, I am under you

in water, my mouth wide and hiding

in shade. I am the stillness in morning

you search for, diving, without breathing.