As Winter Turns Bad, Ice Anglers Get Warmed Up : Recreation: Small ‘towns’ appear on frozen lakes as fishermen walk on water to get to their spot. ‘When times get tough, people go fishing,’ a businessman says.

It is the time of year when any northerner can walk on water, drive on water, even erect cities of shanties on water. Some people fall in. A few die. But the ice escapades continue.

Mackinac Island residents stake their Christmas trees in the Lake Huron ice to mark safe snowmobile passage to the mainland. Folks on the Stonington Peninsula cut the long trip to town by driving their cars across Lake Michigan instead of around it. In the Les Cheneaux islands, they attach airplane engines and propellers to home-built sleds and blow their way across.

And when the ice starts to melt, Drummond Island kids tether their snowmobiles to shore and make a contest out of who can drive farthest onto Lake Huron before getting dunked.

But the most fanatic and faithful are the ice fishermen, who drag little shacks onto frozen lakes and sit inside for hours, sipping peppermint schnapps and angling for slow-feeding perch or pike.

There are enough ice-fishing aficionados to build a business on, such as Best Tackle Co. in Northport. The fishing tackle company thrives despite a bad economy.

“When times get tough, people go fishing,” said Best Vice President George Young. And ice fishing, which requires only a hole in the ice and a stubby foot-long pole with a spool of line, is about the cheapest way to go.

Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New York are Best’s bread-and-butter states. But ice fishing is spreading south and west, Young said, citing orders from Colorado, Washington, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.

When it comes to shanties, nobody runs an ice show like Minnesota.

“I’ll tell you something about Minnesota,” Young said. “They lay out their fishing shanties just like towns on their lakes, with streets and electricity so the guys have TV. I have even seen some that had carpet on the floor.”

Shanty cities are as popular in Michigan, and some towns run festivals around the fishing villages. Beulah explodes fireworks over its ice town. Tawas City cuts a hole for “polar bear” swimming. Houghton Lake hosts Tip-Up Town, USA, named for the fishing rig that springs a flag when a fish strikes.

About 40,000 people attended Houghton Lake’s back-to-back weekend carnivals in January, a crowd so large that the ice sagged under its weight. The main events are staged over shoals, however, so anyone who falls through is left standing in a mere foot of water.

Even so, carnival chairman Dick Fuller said, there are the foolhardy few who drive their trucks and vans over the lake’s pressure ridges. Some go in. “We put out warnings, but it doesn’t make any difference,” he said.

Two snowmobilers already have died on Houghton Lake this winter: One rammed his machine into a pier and the other broke through thin ice and drowned. A week later, fishermen undaunted by the tragedies were zipping across the foot-thick icecap not only in snowmobiles but in pickup trucks, vans and station wagons.

Out on the lake one winter day, ice fisherman Larry Lawrence sat quietly in the dark of his fishing coop. Two black lines dangled from reels bolted to the plywood walls, dipping into the water where he had chipped out holes with an iron ice spud.

The little room glowed green from the ice below, and Lawrence could see his silver minnows swimming in lazy circles six feet down. A propane heater hissed dreamily; snow banked around the outer walls kept cold air from seeping in. A bald eagle wheeled in the sky above the shanty, icy wind under its wings.