Atop the ice - Part 1

LITTLE GLEN LAKE, Mich. -- We plunged over the shoreline hill and into the crystalline fog; the surefooted Ski-Doo quickly found the ice below. The fog made it hard to see, but Annette was driving and knew the way.

Like my first time on a horse, I held white-knuckled to the snowmobile’s passenger handle not knowing what to expect. But I liked it. The wind slapped my face, the ice in the air snapped me awake and I marveled that I was actually here. 

The assignment this day: Ice fishing. Annette was my guide.

It was pre-dawn. The fog was in fact a series of thin layers covering the lake and shoreline, climbing like stairs into the surrounding trees. But it was thick enough at ice level to muffle the “braaap” of the Ski-Doo’s engine.

It would be a beautiful day. Above the fog, the sky was nearly cloudless and turquoise blue. To the east, faint yellows began to show – hints of the sun. 

To folks like Annette Lewis who have practiced the art for years, ice fishing may seem routine. But to someone like me from the south who visits here in warmer seasons – only once before in February – ice fishing has remained a mystery.

Until today. 

Annette steered the Ski-Doo west, then nosed it more south and then east. We crossed multiple snowmobile tracks along the way … a patchwork of tread paths woven like fabric.

At first I thought Annette was lost, perhaps confused by the fog.

Anticipating the question, she shouted over the engine: “I’m checking to see if anyone else is out here!”

Sure enough, squat shanties softly appeared and then disappeared as we roared by. None seemed active – though to the novice, it’s difficult to know when a shanty is occupied and when not.

Soon she made a beeline to her shanty, which had been built by her husband Don, a home builder.  It’s Annette’s pride and joy. I would soon learn it’s her sanctuary, too.

The Ski-Doo puttered to a stop in front of the hut. Annette immediately began the routine: unlock the door, grab the shovel, move snow away from the entrance but fill snow in around the shanty’s seams to keep the ice below it from thawing. 

Then … bring out the propane tank that fuels the shanty’s small heater, fire it up and pull back the trap door on the floor.

Before describing that hole, let me describe the dark-green shanty – a marvel.

Its dimension is 6 feet square. You can stand inside, so its peak is about 7 feet. The black roof slopes slightly; a silver, capped chimney pops through it.

The door is perhaps 2 feet wide and features a porthole toward the top and a circle vent at the bottom. In addition to the porthole, there are two small windows, one on either side.

Outside and below each window is a long 2 x 4 piece of lumber bracketed to the shanty, extending beyond the shanty’s front and back by about a foot and a half. These are the handles used to lift the shanty aboard and off a sled, which at the start of the season is dragged by snowmobile to the favored spot on the ice.

Inside, the trim is polished pine with multiple shelves, hooks, pegs and other devices in place to organize equipment and accessories. High on the west wall: a carbon monoxide detector.

There are benches the length of the shanty on either side of the hole. Annette always brings towels to put on the benches to block the cold. It is cold this morning … 13 degrees. The heater hasn’t done much yet to change that. 

As for the hole … it’s 2 feet wide by 3 feet long. Don and friends created it by cutting through the foot-thick ice using a chain saw. The hole seems dark; you’re not sure of the depth below. Annette breaks through the thin layer of ice that firmed up over night, then grabs a bucket to scoop the ice chunks clear.

So far, Annette has left the narrow door open. The sun, now rising just above the horizon, shoots through.

“You ready to start?” Annette asks.

“Sure!” I replied.

She grabbed the door handle and swung it shut. The hut quickly turned dark, like she’d thrown a switch.  

The hole, once dark, now glowed a soft green powered by the daylight filtering through the ice.

It was quietly beautiful. The water was pristinely clear … you could see every detail of the sandy bottom 10 feet below.

And there, sliding back and forth, up and down, their eyes wide and mouths open, were ... the fish.

Next:  The power of minnows, the catch, and checking in on your neighbors.

To see photos of Part 1, click here.

Road trip today, fish tomorrow

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – Tonight, I’m staying at a hotel about a half hour from our cottage on Glen Lake.  Tomorrow, starting at 6:45 a.m., I head there to try my hand at ice fishing.

I’m no fisherman.  The last fish I caught was a bluegill from the North Pond at my grandfather’s farm.  I think I was maybe 8 years old. I didn’t even know how to get it off the hook. Still don’t.

But I’m chronicling the last year in the life of our cottage, month by month, so I needed a focus for February.  Ice fishing seemed a natural.  I’d been curious to know what goes on in the fishing shanties that dot Michigan’s many frozen lakes ever since we ventured up here one February to see winter’s effect.  We saw a mess of huts just beyond our family’s shoreline.

So, thanks to the Lewis family, I’m headed to the Lewis shanty on Little Glen Lake, shown above. (That’s Don Lewis, who built it.)  Even in February, a bit of heaven. More on how that goes in later posts.

Right now, though, I want to talk about the drive up.   First off, a road trip is always good for the soul … a great respite from the demands of daily work life. You’re on your own clock; you can head down this road or that.  You can play the music loud, or play no music at all.

But what’s been most fun on this trip is thinking back to the many times we’ve made this trek before, although always in summer.

All of the sibling families have their own tales, of course.  But the one my family remembers best is what we now call, “The Road Trip from Hell.”

Seriously.

It started as all of our Michigan trips started.  We had the minivan, of course.  And we’d stuffed it, and the car-top carrier, as full as a polish sausage.  Oh, and then we threw in the dogs.

The kids were young -- Meghan maybe 13, Zach only 10.  We stopped at McDonalds to grab some breakfast, then headed east along Interstate 70, eventually through St. Louis.

This portion of the trip was uneventful, though I’d decided to get an extra-large coffee at Mac’s.  Not unusual, really, though I’d been trying to cut back on caffeine ever since a cup of joe sent my heart racing while in San Francisco on business. A long story, but the doc eventually blamed dehydration plus caffeine as the culprits.  (Both, as you’ll see, are pertinent to this story.)

All was fine.  We decided to take Interstate 70 east to Effingham, Illinois, then up to Champaign, where we’d stay the night.  We stopped for gas before we hit Effingham.  I got another large cup of coffee.

We turned north onto Interstate 57. No big deal.  I’d make this trip many times as a student at University of Illinois.  But just as we turned, the radio barked out a warning: “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for the following counties.” 

The message proceeded to mention all of the affected counties, most of which paralleled I-57.

And sure enough, as we headed north, the storm clouds gathered to the west.  We kept the radio in tune. I didn’t mention it to the others, but I was concerned.  Tornados can be treacherous in central Illinois … a land so flat that tornados skip across it like a flat stone on a river.

Now, one thing I didn’t consider was the effect of the radio’s warnings on my children.  We all know how the screech of the nation’s emergency alert system on the radio rubs us raw. Well, couple that with the gray-green storm clouds mounting to the left, and you get a volatile mix.

Oh my, was it!  In came more news … a tornado was sighted, just a few miles up the road.

And now, the rain and winds were heavy. Thunder on the roof! Plus real thunder and massive flashes of lightning. I could barely see the road. Meanwhile, not only was I already on edge, but the extra caffeine seemed to be pumping into me by the second, causing an extra boost of angst.

Worse, the two dogs grew restless, now wide eyed, squirmy and worried. 

As the tornado reports continued to spill out, Zach, now panicked, summed up the situation.

“We’re going to die! We’re going to die!  We’re going to die!!”

Of course, I had no intention of us dying. But the combination of the heavy caffeine dose, the heavy rains, thunder and lightning now crashing all around, the radio screeching its warnings, Zach predicting our demise and the dogs responding as if it was the last reckoning, sent my heart racing … faster than Sea Biscuit’s or Secretariat’s on the cusp of victory.

Of course, the family didn’t know this.  Until I said, somewhat meekly, “Uh, Cindy, I think I need to pull over.  My heart’s doing weird things.”

Cindy, already tested by the shouts and ruckus in the back seat, kept calm.  She remembered that dehydration was part of the San Francisco problem.

She shoved a bottle of water in my hand.

“Drink!!” she commanded.

Which I did. A lot.  Not that I felt dehydrated.  But it seemed a politic thing to do.

I also found a highway exit, pulled over, stopped the car, and then took a deep breath.  A deep, deep breath. And with that breath, my heart slowed to normal … just like that.

Weird.

By that time, the storms had flown by, across I-57.  The winds had slowed, the rains lessened.

All was calm.  Or at least calmer. 

“I think I’m okay now,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”

And we did.

Now, there’s more to this tale.  Sometime I’ll share it.  It includes a backed up toilet, Zach’s experience with an exploding Big Kahuna drink, and when I went the wrong way on a one-way street at one point.  Truly, a hellish trip, at least through Illinois and Indiana.  But we survived.

And there were lessons learned.  For one, I now avoid caffeine … at least in big doses.  I also drink a lot of water and breathe deeply. Second, Zach realized that weather is not to be feared, and storm clouds don’t necessarily mean instant death.

And third, finally, that adversity is the glue that often holds us together.  Our family was stronger for having braved this journey.

So take that, you dark prince. You thought you’d ride shotgun on this trip.  Hardly.

Sure, we had to get past Indiana with you on board.  But we left you in the dust … at the Michigan state line. 

The rooftop lights

I keep a list of blog ideas.  Many from my past ... fun, full of fancy.  Some more serious.

This one is serious.  It’s not often that drama – serious drama – invades your life.  But on this day, it did.  And we were both so young.

I was walking home from Avery, our grade school.  I remember it now in some detail: I had just crossed Newport Avenue and was climbing up the small hill called Park Road.  I was carrying my trombone case;  I was in sixth grade.

Ahead of me, at the top of the hill, was a police car.  Its rooftop lights were on.

At first I thought, “cool.”  I’ve always been one of those gawkers intrigued by police and fire-engine lights. Then, as I passed, I looked in the car.  I looked twice. My little sister, Barb, just 7 years old, was in the back seat. She’d been crying.

It was one of those moments when the clichés are so true: The world spins, your stomach sinks, everything normal suddenly seems out of kilter. Barb, in a police car, crying?

What happened?

Unsure of what was going on, I asked the cop that question.

“She’s my sister,” I added.

“She was hit by a car,” he said … while she was crossing Newport.

“Hit by a car?!”  I thought. My limbs got shaky.

Barb, then in first grade, always left school earlier than me. She was on a different schedule. That was back when pretty much everyone walked to and from school.

Now that I knew what happened, I needed to sit next to her, to be with her. It was automatic. I didn’t know much about comforting others then, but I knew my place was in the back seat, next to my sister. 

I climbed in, and Barb recalls that I stretched the trombone case across our two laps. (There was no place else to put it.)

She and I looked at each other. Then we cried, she from seeing the familiar face of her brother, I think; I from seeing my sister, hurt.

The fact was, she was scared. And I was, too.

I also remember the officer telling us that he’d tracked down Dad, and that Dad was rushing there from his office. 

The other surprise: Doug Kellerman, a close friend of Dad’s who lived a few houses up on Newport, was also in the car, in the backseat.  Doug, an aerospace engineer, was fighting leukemia and so staying at home. Dad must have called Doug to help after he got the news.

I remember that Doug and the officer worried about Dad’s driving: “I hope he gets here without a problem,” one of them said. “It’s hard to drive when this kind of thing happens.”

But soon Dad arrived fine – in the white Pontiac Tempest that he had inherited from my grandparents.

He jumped out of the car.  He was worried. You could see it in his face. He quickly gathered up Barb and said he’d take her to the emergency room, just to make sure everything was okay.  I was told to head home to the house, just a few blocks away.

           

And I did.  I was upset, sure, worried about Barb, but comforted that Dad was there.

In the end Barb would be fine, though the ER visit apparently wasn’t fun: “I remember sitting in the ER with one of those tiny kidney shaped vomit trays and hoping I wouldn’t have to use it,” Barb recalls now.

Barb, of course, was lucky. And eventually, all settled down at home.  Mom, who must have been doing errands when all of this occurred – no cell phones! – reassured us that everything would be okay.  Imagine her pain of not being at home!

But now I wonder about the driver who hit Barb.  And what became of him.  And what he remembers … including possible regrets.

It’s also interesting how we sometimes store memories under trap doors. And it takes something like a blog to bring them back into the sunlight.

This isn’t a fond memory. But its lessons were important … about sibling love, near misses and the fragile nature of things. Plus, anytime you can avoid those rooftop lights, it’s a good thing.

Yes, Barb was lucky that day. But I was lucky, too, because she was.

And that’s the point: When luck blesses one of us in a family, it blesses us all.