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Me around 7 with a "keeper" pickerel |
"Here," he said, and set the chipper down. The metal blade gleamed in the morning sun.
His hands were thick around the handle. The fingers didn't bend right. They never had, not since I could remember. Korea, Mom said when I asked. The cold got to them over there. He was just eighteen when they sent him. The frostbite left them always numb.
Dad slipped the wrist strap over his right hand and raised the chipper. He brought it down hard. Chunk. Ice flew up in white chips. He worked steady, chopping down through nearly two feet of ice. His breath came out in white puffs. The tendons in his neck stood out.
"You try," he said after a few minutes. He slipped the strap off and helped me get it around my wrist. "Don't want to lose it in the hole."
I took the handle. It was heavier than it looked. The metal was cold even through my mittens. I chopped the way Dad showed me, trying to hit the same spot each time, then working around the edges to keep the hole wide. My arms got tired fast.
Dad used the skimmer to clear the ice chips, the big ladle with holes in it scooping out the slush and chunks that floated up once we broke through.
"Good," Dad said. "Before we get a gas auger, this is how we do it."
Dad got out a tip-up, uncoiled some line and attached a lead weight to the hook, dropped it down the hole, letting it sink until the line went slack. "Bottom," he said, and pulled it up a couple feet. He slid the button stop down the line to mark the depth. "Couple feet off the bottom. That's where they feed."
My brothers and I watched him bait the hook. "Hook goes through like this," he said, showing us. The shiner wiggled on the hook. Dad's thick fingers worked the shiner with surprising gentleness. "Not too deep. You want them to swim."
We chopped holes along the edge of the drop-off. Dad knew where the fish were. He always knew. Uncle Tom and my cousin arrived and set up their own tip-ups down the line from ours. Uncle Tom had been in a different war than Dad - the Pacific, on a battleship. He moved slower on the ice but his hands worked fine.
After we set all the tip-ups, one of my brothers chopped a rectangular hole between our lines. He worked the ice chipper in a rectangle, maybe two feet by three feet, chopping down deep while the other cleared it out with the skimmer.
Then my brother moved about a foot away and chopped another smaller hole, this one going all the way through to the water below. Dad had showed us how to use the ice chipper to cut a narrow channel connecting the small hole to the rectangular basin. "Feed hole brings the water in. Keep the fish fresh. Too small for them to swim out."
The water rose up into the rectangular basin they'd made, black and cold. Dad nodded, satisfied with their work.
"Now we wait," Dad said.
We sat on overturned buckets. My brothers, myself, and cousin got hot chocolate from Mom's big jug.
Dad reached into the tip-up bag and pulled out a port wine bottle. Dark glass, no label. He unscrewed the cap with his thick fingers and took a sip.
"Sneaky Pete," he said, holding it up like a toast to the empty lake. "Keeps the blood moving."
He passed it to Uncle Tom, who took a drink and nodded. They shared it back and forth, and Uncle Tom started telling stories from the Pacific - battleship stories with a few choice words thrown in that always made us kids giggle behind our mittens. Dad would shake his head but he was smiling too.
A flag went up on the third tip-up. Number three that's mine! I ran over, my heart pounding. Dad and my two brothers right behind me. Hand over hand, I brought up the fish.
"Pickerel," Dad said as I held it up, my hands shaking with excitement. The fish was smaller than a pike, with the same green back and needle teeth. "Good fighter. You did good."
Dad showed me how to unhook it, how to hold it so it wouldn't thrash. His hands covered mine, steady and certain with the fish.
"Back you go," he said, and helped me slip it into the dark water. The pickerel flicked its tail and disappeared.
"Why'd we let it go?" I asked.
"Not big enough to keep. Let it grow."
It was cold, but the early morning sun warmed us even as our breath steamed. A little later when the sun was higher, we set up the small charcoal grill up on the ice and got the coals going. The smell of charcoal and cooking hamburgers and hot dogs mixed with the cold air. We huddled around the grill, warming our hands over the heat, eating lunch while watching the tip-ups.
The flags kept going up. Yellow perch mostly, fat and golden. These we kept, dropping them into the live well where they swam in slow circles in the small space. Our cousin Tommy pulled up a nice brown trout, dark spotted and thick through the middle. That one went in the live well too, the water rippling as it joined the perch.
We fished until the sun was dropping and our feet were numb. Dad never complained about the cold, never mentioned his hands. But I saw him flex his fingers when he thought I wasn't looking, trying to work the stiffness out.
Dad pulled the fish from the live well and put them in a bucket pacled with snow, the perch and brown trout still fresh and bright-colored.
On the walk back to the car, our boots crunching on the snow, I asked him about Korea. Just once.
"Cold there," he said. "Colder than this."
That was all. But it was enough. I understand why he never wore gloves, why he always said the cold here wasn't so bad. Why his hands were the way they were, and why that was just how things were. Why he bought us expensive mittens when we were kids, I understand that now. He didn't take any disability for those frostbitten hands for over seventy years, until his late eighties. That's Dad.
We loaded the gear in the station wagon. Dad started the engine and turned the heat on full.
"Good day," he said.
It was. I knew it was. But I couldn't have known that mornings like this were building what would follow. Dad teaching patience as we watched for flags. How to work steady through thick ice, one deliberate strike at a time. Letting me struggle with that heavy chipper until I my arms ached, then helping just enough.
He was showing us quiet certainty. Respect for wild things - releasing that small pickerel to grow. That good things come to those who wait and watch.
So much started in places like this, with a man whose hands were numbed by cold and war, but whose knowledge ran deeper than the ice and water beneath our feet.
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