Want a Frozen Fish? Stick With Mrs. Paul’s

Behold the ice fisherman.

Behold that frozen thing hanging off the end of his nose.

Most of you who don’t go ice fishing on a regular basis--and admit it now, there are some of you who hardly ever pick up the ice chisel and mealworms and head out for a nice day at the lake this time of year--snicker at those who do. If you don’t snicker, it’s because you howl right out loud at the thought of intentionally stumbling onto a frozen lake to allow the ripping Arctic winds of winter to mercilessly rake your face and body.

Of course, you should be advised that there are people in these parts who really think highly of your habit of lying nearly naked in the sand, the sun of a thousand deserts sauteing your oil-smothered skin in what entomologists and physicians agree is the perfect setup for that coveted double delight: infected horsefly bites and a slow, cancerous death.

But forget that. This is about ice fishing, which, according to government statistics, is the fastest-growing sport in America that involves four pairs of socks and so many other layers of clothing that it is humanly impossible to go to the bathroom, a sport in which the frequent wiping of your nose on a sleeve is considered perfectly acceptable social behavior.

And it doesn’t even have to be your sleeve.

And so it is here, in highest Colorado, that sometimes dozens of stout people--mostly men with names like Arglok and Gbjorke--forsake that other winter sport, the one that has made Colorado so famous (I speak, of course, of leaping frantically out of the way of lurching, glassy-eyed actors and actresses riding cocaine and skis in Aspen) for this more placid sport of yanking a bewildered trout through a small hole in the ice and then clubbing it on the head until it is dead.

On 100 lakes, from Colorado Springs to Grand Junction, from Blue Mountain to Bonanza to Bond to Boone to Buffalo Creek--hey, why even look past the Bs for funny names when you’ve got those five together?--they shuffle themselves out onto the ice, clutching rods and reels and worms and shiny little lures and ice chisels to blast their way through several feet of crystal ice, all with the very same prayer:

Dear God, please don’t let me slip and crack my head wide open right now because there are no hospitals within a day’s drive and even if there was one, these demented people I am with, Lord, none of them would drive me anyway.

If they don’t slip and crack their heads open, and believe it or not such misfortune doesn’t strike all of them, they trudge methodically across the frozen wasteland, the ice threatening with each step to fling them down heavily onto their skulls. They walk and walk and walk some more. Finally, they stop at the spot , a place they are sure the fish swim in numbers so great as to rival the unfortunate things Dan Quayle has said in his lifetime.

They know this is the spot because a guy named Lou, who has a friend who is the uncle of the stepmother of the guy he works with, claimed he caught three fish right there in that spot from a boat 11 years ago. In the summer.

And then they chisel their way through 36 inches of granite-hard ice, lower their baits through the hole and wait for a trout or salmon to cruise by. Specifically, a trout or salmon that doesn’t think it even slightly odd for an earthworm with a hook through its face to be dangling from a string under three feet of ice.

If they don’t catch any fish--and as you’ll see in a moment, such a thing does happen--they blame the barometric pressure.

It is at this moment, as they settle onto the ice above the holes and the howling wind of a Rocky Mountain winter blows so hard that it musses up their hair--and I’m talking the hair in their noses --that the anglers become the ice-fishing adage:

A jerk on one end of the line waiting for a jerk on the other.

*

Sometimes, however, they are rewarded. Colorado folklore has it that a man known only as Fred actually caught a fish in this manner. Recently? Well, you be the judge: That fish, legend has it, was the very last real meal eaten by the Donner Party on its way to California. Next on the menu for that tough-luck group was Baked Stuffed Eldon.

But without that account of an ice fishing trip more than 100 years ago, it wouldn’t be much of a sport at all. Because deep inside the frail human mind is the need to believe, the need to be bolstered by such stories of roaring success.

The need to hope.

And so I sit on an upside-down bucket far from shore on a place called Eleven-Mile Reservoir near the Continental Divide, elevation 10,000 feet, the temperature of a hundred Ice Ages (officially -18 degrees) making me shiver so violently that people in cabins nearly a mile away are shouting at me to keep the noise down, the winds of all the universe snapping my ears back and forth like the flippers on a pinball machine.

After chiseling through the endless ice, I lower a line. Problem: At 18 below, standing water freezes again in--let me check this with hydro-physicists--uh, half a second. So the line was stuck in the re-forming ice faster than you could shout “hypothermia.”

You get around this problem by kicking at the hole with a boot heel. And then the water freezes over the hole again and your boot is encrusted in ice and your feet hurt real bad from the invading cold.

And all of that is the good part of ice fishing. The bad parts? Well, try slipping your hands out of a pair of warm gloves into 18-below temperatures and then trying to tie a knot in fishing line.

How cold? Well, with an uncontrollable spasm induced by the cold, my left thumb twitched badly and the needle-sharp point of the hook buried itself into the flesh. Deeply. And you know what? It didn’t hurt. Not a bit. Not a single sensation of pain. I had, in essence, caught myself. And the only way I knew that was because the sight of a three-inch metal minnow dangling from your thumb with blood trickling down your hand is, well, an uncommon sight.

I yanked the hook right back out, taking a bit of meat with it, the blood flowing a bit steadier, and it still didn’t hurt.

I fished in vain for nearly four hours, deciding to call it a day only after the crushing cold began to affect my mind. I think. Because unless Dom DeLuise actually was at Eleven-Mile Reservoir in remote Colorado that day, leading a pack of llamas across the ice, well . . . I firmly believe I was hallucinating.

But you know what kept me going for those hours? It was that need to believe. The need to hope.

And oh, did I ever hope.

I hoped like hell that my truck would start.

And I hoped like hell that when my brain thawed, I could remember the name of the guy who suggested I give this sport a try.

I’d like to return his razor-sharp six-foot-long ice chisel.

As soon as he turns his back.