America has ice fishing, of course. In Minnesota and its surrounding environs, quite famously. But it’s not too common in the states, not like it is in, say, Ontario. Or Canada generally. The ice gets thick here, and the cold frigid, and we go out and do shit. Fishing is one of them.
I say this because you might not actually know that we go out in the snow constantly. I didn’t, before I came here. I thought it would be five months stuck indoors a year in exchange for sane governance and a kind people.
Nope, you have your cake and eat it too. I spend more time outside in winter here than I did in summer in Portland, because it was always hot and terrible and wet, and here it’s dry even when it’s snowing and pleasant and brisk. Seriously. Look up the number of sunny days. It’s a hundred more outdoor days a year.
The temperature shift scared me most about the move. I remember talking to my friend about it. I told him about how I’d lived in a ramshackle slumlord shitshack in Bellingham way back in the late 90s, a place where the floor sagged so low that you could see the ground through the living room wall.
The pilot light would sometimes just, you know, go out. You had to watch it. That’s what the landlord said. One of his houses later burned down. But he was rich, so, you know, no real consequences.
The thing about that place was, you could stuff a towel in that hole, you could put a towel in front of every door, the drafts would still chill you to the bone on a cold day. I hated that feeling of desperation and cold.
I told this to my friend, and I said “I won’t mind if I have to wear blankets in the house, if I have to wear a coat inside if it gets really bad, I just, you know, I want a sense of it. I want to mentally prepare.”
This is trauma thinking. When the worst has happened to you, you never want it to happen again, and often preparation is key. Not in every case, of course. It’s a balancing act. Prepping for a night on the ice takes a lot of this kind of thinking to stay safe. Prepping to move to Canada, the least of your concerns is if a modern and effective democracy has considered better insulation for its climate. Of course it has.
The problem for the American was conceptualizing a modern and effective democracy.
He told me not to worry. I should have listened.
The first time I went ice fishing I hand augured. In February. It was a nice workout. That’s a polite way to say the work wrecked my arms to shit. The ice was 18 inches thick.
It took two hours to drill three holes. I was on the wrong lake, with the wrong bait. I didn’t have the physical strength built up to hold the auger vertically while grinding downward with a horizontal twist. It was hell.
Glorious, wonderful, smiling hell.
The whole time I was laughing, giggling like a madman, enjoying myself. I hadn’t had that much fun in thirty years.
I had gotten in my car, a machine of miracles where explosions drive pistons using precise calculations for maximal efficiency. Then I drove my magical chariot through weather that would kill the average person with too much exposed skin in a matter of minutes, and then I departed that safe car in many layers of light-yet-warm clothes, and I walked out on a lake.
I fuckin’ walked on water, y’all.
Badly, maybe. I slipped. Slid. Nearly biffed it. I had to balance a bucket and a rod and a giant drill-looking thing. My intention, my actual plan, which many fools had planned before me, was to walk out on that ice and drill into it and draw from it fish. Casually.
This is a real thing that happens. I’ve done it.
I didn’t that time. But I have learned.
To do that real thing that happens, I sat on ice that was almost two feet thick on a tiny stool in temperatures nearing -20 Celsius. It was pretty comfy, for the most part.
No hyperbole. No sarcasm.
Before I read about ice fishing, having caught my first Canadian fish that summer, I knew nothing about it. Full disclosure, my brain thought that fish couldn’t survive in frozen lakes. No shit. I didn’t even think about it, my brain just said “They must migrate.” Or that they froze, and then reanimated, like, I dunno, goldfish, after some period of hibernation.
I didn’t NEED to think about it, so I didn’t. What can I say? I’m still American, even as I become Canadian.
I just took it for granted fish couldn’t live in ice. It’s fucking ICE. And fish need air. Ice would stop air. Duh.
This was my cursory dumb logic.
And then I read all about it, and learned, and holy hell. It’s cool. They’re not only down there, sometimes they’re spawning.
I practically shit myself when I learned about thermocline inversion, when I started to understand that in certain situations, it gets so cold in water that hot and cold reverse. Fish will go down to seek heat. Which notably, usually rises.
This is a real thing.
When I talk to people who haven’t experienced Canadian cold they are immediately dismissive of their own capacity, and they think they can’t handle it.
Bullshit, even if you’re whiny. And not just in a “tough up” sense. In the sense that it’s not really that bad.
Of course you can do it. And it’s not even that hard. You simply wear one more layer than you usually might in winter, and cover your chin and neck somehow, along with your head. You can be out in -25 for hours and be laughing and having fun. I know, because I was yesterday.
Your beard may freeze. Fortunately, your beard is not right up against your face, usually. Remember to duckface:
The man in the above picture is not actually cold.
He’s cool.
Your glasses will fog, maybe, when you go in the tent. That’s a pain.
So’s dragging the tent, the propane, the chairs, the poles, the minnows, the fishfinder, the drill, the scoop, and a million other things in a sled for a mile. But that part’s optional. You can also bring one bucket and a chair down to the edge of the water and still catch perch. I just like the exercise.
And the realization when I arrive that I’ve just pulled a hundred fifty pounds a mile across ice on a frozen lake in literal paradise to draw fish from the earth like some mythical modern Hercules, all while eating a Pop Tart.
This makes having to live in a place where you can see earth through the walls kinda okay in retrospect. I just had to drag things a while to get here.
The thing about the cold here is that it’s the exact same cold you experience in the United States, with one extra factor. Time.
If you’ve experienced the cold of the Pacific Northwest (which I’ve learned isn’t REALLY cold, it’s tee shirt weather that people whine about), you’ve experienced maybe 20-30 Fahrenheit. Which can certainly kill you, but probably won’t, unless you’re out there a real long time, and without proper protection.
-25 is about the same, in terms of how it feels, for most of your body. The only difference is in the face. If you’ve walked around in 30 degrees, you can walk around in -30 degrees.
The thing you can’t do is be exposed. You must wear your gloves, your hat, your neck protection, at all times. Because if you take it off, you have about five minutes before you’re fucked. Five hours in 30, five minutes in -30.
If you can resist the urge to strip naked randomly, you’ll be fine. Just drink one less Molson than is required to reach that point, you’ll figure it out.
I once fucked around and found out with the cold.
These days I’ll go out there on a -25 day that feels like -35 barefoot and run around on the porch like an idiot and come inside shouting BRISK BRISK BRISK and feeling alive. Sometimes I’ll take the young boys having a sleepover out with me, because that’s fun and we feel alive.
Otherwise usually I put on a coat and such. This is good policy.
When the dog was new, she would run around in that yard and hide and be an asshole like dogs often are. I feared for her in that cold. I have since learned that dogs are just fine in those temperatures, generally, and thrive in them, because they fuckin’ love snow. The internet would have you think five minutes will kill them. No. If you only let them be out for five minutes, they’re more likely to kill you.
And so this ingrate puppy would hide and make me come out twice or three times a day to chase her. I would put on my slippers and ight sweats and a tee shirt, because, like I said, you’re fine for five minutes.
She ran behind the garage, and I walked after her, and then my feet remembered the bricks I’d left under the two feet of snow in late fall by kicking into them. I ate some shit.
Face in snow. My forearms plunged in palm to shoulder. I experienced a moment of lightning cold so utter I thought I’d been frozen by the Lich from Adventure Time. My balls retracted so fast they exploded through the top of my skull and entered steady orbit around the mesopause. Some say they’re still up there spinning, knocking Space-X satellites out of orbit and fretting over their own size in some toxic masculine stew. I let out a howl somewhere between passing a kidney stone and a gout attack.
The dog, of course, was still hiding, so I had to find her, and find her I did, brushing furiously at my arms, carrying her in. “You idiot,” I said. “You sent my balls into outer space. That’s a bad dog. A bad dog!”
Her tongue lolled and I gave her a treat. She wasn’t insulted because, and this is true, dogs can’t speak English. I call her an asshole all the time while smiling, and we’re great friends. She doesn’t care if I have testicles any more. Or that they’re space testicles. She is blessedly only in this moment, and may we become so.
In that short span of time, I got close to hypothermia. I know, because I actual got some mild hypothermia a few times hunting up on Mount Rainier when I was a kid. It took hours then. It took seconds here.
That’s the thing to watch out for. Time.
This is generally true about everything though.
The cold is such a non-issue that the problem with ice fishing generally is the way you have to stop doing it too early. The sun rises later and goes down faster in the winter. This is a True Science Fact.
You get bummed out because it’s 4, and you’ve already gotta get outta there. Not because you’re cold. Because as it gets dark, the fish get bitey. But it’s bad to be out on the ice in the cold. Moose tracks are what you call a clue.
But I always wanted to spend a night out there, you know? See what happens at night. It wasn’t enough to ride my magic explosion machine to walk on water and draw fish from the ice in the daylight. I had to do it when it was most ill-advised, at night, when all the carnivores come out and it gets coldest.
So I fuckin’ did. And I took my son, too.
You’ll need a tent. Or an igloo. I chose a tent.
It’s not the right kind of ice here to build an igloo. Which disappoints me. And makes me want to take a magic flying machine to where the ice is right just to see if I can.
I may one day do this.
It’s quieter than usual on a lake at night when there’s snow. The open space makes it nice. The stars are great. It’s also terrifying. It’s hard to explain, but when I’m surrounded by trees and a bear could literally ambush me if I didn’t hear it coming from three feet, that’s less terrifying than sweeping a long flashlight beam across a lake where you’re the sole occupant. I think it’s that inherent knowledge that there are depths below you. You are surrounded by emptiness on all sides.
That’s also what’s humbling and beautiful about it and makes it an addiction. This will happen again.
You sleep a lot harder despite the cot. I have never slept more than 6-7 hours camping given my age and back. I slept nine hours on the ice.
The fish don’t want to bite in February, so I didn’t really get to figure out what they do at night, if they’re more active. There were a ton of fish on the finder, but not even one strike. Which means I have to do this all again, in one month, when they are biting.
But I fished in bed. Magic machine, walk on water, fish in bed.
These are things that happen.
The most intriguing part of the whole thing was listening to my son use a winding radio to listen to Ozzy Osbourne and go from station to station. He found the most irritating and stereotypical music of all and that was wonderful. I only made him change the channel once, when a country station singer was talking about the joys of summer and mentioned that tiki torches were a big part of that for him.
Fuck that guy. I guess America follows you around, even out on the ice.
The word used among us was delightful. It’s been the go-to of late.
“This shit’s delightful.”
And it was.
Things in Canada are generally delightful, and everyone you meet is a solid dude, great guy. Even the women.
It’s like the Wobegon creed, except it’s true.
You’ll be outside walking and see a pretty pretty pink pony doll house sitting on top of a four-foot berm of snow and imagine the child who played on that and wasn’t afraid to be out in the neighborhood and you turn to your partner and you say, “Now isn’t that delightful?”
It doesn’t feel very masculine, but it’s as apt as apt can fucking get. And anyway, I lost my balls in a tragic hypothermia incident, so fuck it.
You see a snowboard just left out in the yard, because people here know it’s not going to walk off.
That’s delightful.
You have a neighbor stop you to chat, and you chat for about an hour about nothing.
Delightful as fuck.
In the United States that’s a one-way awkward nod conversation about why GMOs are trying to take over the world and that clearly Bezos is behind it, and have you armed up yet?
Here it’s about how tired he is of shoveling snow, and how much he doesn’t agree with someone, but understands why they might think that way, and how about them Maple Leafs, and you write too much, you should rest more.
When you finish having that chat you go into the house and you take off your layers and you say, “Solid dude. Great guy.”
Or it’s summer and your neighbor, a nice woman with a passion for art and poetry, knocks to offer you some old bricks, and you have a long chat about life on lakes and what it means, how art matters, and you go into the house and you take off your sandals and you say, “Solid dude. Great guy.” not because she’s a guy, but because it’s an ethic.
It’s what it felt like thirty years ago, when I was young, before everyone decided to lose their shit entirely in my home country.
And even if she decided she was a solid dude, a great guy, no one would much give a shit. Then you’d have a long conversation about how important Gordie was, because to an American it’s hard to understand, but then you start to understand, and share music, and a beer, and relief.
Which is also delightful.
I am a writer and my balls are in space.
My books need to sell in order for me to have money. My books don’t make money.
I appreciate that you are a group of people who have helped me try to have money. Because of you I am merely in debt, not living in a place where you can see the ground, at least, any more.
My book Glory, which I hope is awesome, is on sale today, and the next few days. It’s a buck. CHEAP! as Mad magazine used to say. Glory would definitely ice fish if she were aware that it was a thing that happens.
If you tell a few people about this, that’d be awesome and very helpful and prove you a solid dude, a great guy.
If you write a review, that’s better than money. That’s like handing me a hundred bucks or a trophy pike. Why? Because people look at reviews, not the book, sadly. I know you crack the spine, I crack the spine, no one else does.
They look at the comment section. BOO! But they do.
So be the comment section you want to see in the world, and help me! Please! The more reviews I get, the more people will give my work a chance.
Or don’t. If you don’t, though, I may just wander out onto the ice and have fun forever, suspended above the depths and isolated between the earth and the sky, living my best life, howling at the moon.
That’d be okay too.