FENCEROWS...Running Out the Engine
I ran the last gasp of fuel from my ice fishing season, because like an ice-auger engine, that is what you do before you tuck it away for the season. My ice engine went out in a final roaring cloud of snow and ice.
Monday night found me in Oshkosh, near the Lake Winnebago shores, with a truckload of jigs, poles, tip-ups, not to mention auger blades that needed sharpening and a portable shanty that needed mending. Wisconsin winters are hard on the essential gears of life.
There was a work schedule to meet- which is not as essential as fishing, but necessary to the greater cause-which is making money to support the semblance of a lower middle-class existence while also affording the real essential stuff found in tackle catalogs. Maybe I could have squeezed in a couple hours on the lake, but a tremendous blast of wind and snow whipped down U.S. Highway 41, dampening my fishing enthusiasm and blocking the Lake Butte des Morts bridge with ice and automobile pile-ups.
There was a bright side to the nasty weather. I had time to stay at work and sharpen my auger blades on the grinder. And I set up the shanty in the loading dock, mending it with whatever I found laying around the shop. As an afterthought, I did some constructive work around the place and actually earned my paycheck for a change. Mostly though, I bided my time and delayed the inevitable.
The inevitable happened on Thursday morning as I left work. The weather broke long enough for me to see clear up into northeast Wisconsin. I followed my visions of final ice-fishing glory into the heart of Oconto County while the weather radio clamored of another snowstorm loping in to chase my heels like a hungry winter bear fresh out of hibernation. The bear didn’t have a chance. I drove fast with the shanty cover billowing from the truck bed like a sail and minnow buckets rattling against the tailgate at every stop. My hurried obsession and rag-tag pilgrimage brought me to the cabin before noon.
I have known Tom Posselt and his wife Sheri Jo for a good number of years. They live in a tucked-away cabin on a hemlock-covered ridge bordering 650,000 acres of Nicolet National Forest. Tom is a fine woodsman and mechanic, the kind of guy who can pull a stalled car out of a snow bank, get the engine running, and still be on the ice for the morning bite. Sheri Jo is a fine artist and writer. She creates wonderful gardens in summer and, in my humble estimation, the best peanut butter and oatmeal cookies in the state.
The Posselt family is kind enough to always take me in on a moments notice. I have yet to figure out why. Their cabin becomes a base of operations that spans out for a 50-mile radius, spilling you within casting and jigging range of more water than can possibly be fished in a lifetime. It may not be heaven on earth but it is close enough for my taste. And it was the perfect place to run the ice engine dry.
Tom Posselt works the auger through heavy snow.
Tom and I drilled holes in the afternoon and caught enough perch for supper. They might not have been the slabs that lure late-season ice anglers over state lines and onto crowded and famous sheets of ice, but they were big enough for us, and they were hungry in front of the coming storm. The growing clouds and hemlock shadows were our only company on the small lake.
A perch taken from a small lake in Oconto County
The first round of fish was caught together in an annual tradition. Sometimes others join us, but the threat of the coming storm kept everyone save me and Tom off the ice this year. It was different after the first day. Tom has obligations to meet, responsibilities that separate him from the likes of total fishing degenerates like myself. Some mornings we fished together, and sometimes in the afternoon. Tom had to go his way and I went mine. We always met in the cabin at nightfall, drying clothes by the woodstove and pretending great wisdom. Sheri Jo listened attentively and added the only pieces of real wisdom.
As the snow came down on an early morning, I found myself standing beneath acres of towering pines and hemlocks called Cathedral Woods. I was searching out snowmobile trails into a remote bay and came across the place as I trudged knee deep in snow. I lost myself in thought and speculation for hours in the snowy halls of pine.
Ceiling of a pine cathedral.
The giants have sat on the ridges in this corner of the Lakewood tract of the Nicolet Forest since the early 1900’s, when the president of the Holt Lumber Company was persuaded by his wife to leave the area untouched by the axes and saws of the loggers. She brought children into the cathedral of pines, teaching them Bible stories and prayers. She felt the power of such a place.
The tall pines whisper back great blue herons to roost every spring and their calls echo over the lakes and valleys, but it was not yet time for the birds of spring. The wind in the treetops blew the snow down in clouds from the nests in the pines and there was no other sound to be heard. It was a fine way to spend a morning.
Tom and I fished together on an afternoon in the forecasted snow squalls. The weight of the snow on the ice pushed water up through the holes and cracks, and although there was 20 inches of solid ice, we stood in 10 inches of water, snowed on from above and soaked through from below. I sat in the bottom of my shack sled like it was a boat. I jigged through a hole at the back of the boat and if it is possible to troll when ice fishing, I was doing it.
I sat alone and tried to solve the mystery of what the pan fish wanted. They were down there, but they were finicky. A tiny orange teardrop jig that had an eyelet so small I could barely see to thread it on the line finally did the trick. Tipped with half a wax worm and held motionless, I caught bluegill after bluegill until the hook finally pulled right out of the jig. It was the only one I had in my box. The ice engine gave one last cough and went still. I laughed maniacally across the barren ice and packed it in.
I’d been away from home for a week. My clothes held the lingering essence of drying wood smoke and I was growing a beard that I hadn’t thought possible. The auger engine was empty, so I bid a fond farewell to my gracious hosts and called it a season.
I stopped in at the Mighty-Fine Sports Shop in Lakewood on my way out of town to say hello to owner, Mark Soletske. We shot the bull and talked of ice fishing. I told him I was done for the year. Waters got hashed over from Marinette to Crandon. Soon the talk ran to trout fishing in spring, gravitated to smallmouth in summer, and you know how the age-old story goes. Fists were pounded on the shop counter in jubilant exclamation until the spring bobbers and lures on the walls shook.
“I know of a lake where you float over the sand and weeds, and it looks clear and bright,” said Mark. “Then all of a sudden the bottom turns dark, and the dark starts moving in a mass, and you realize the mass is made up of perch. Call me when you come back this way in summer, and I’ll take you there.”
My wife will be pleased to see me finally put the auger away for the winter. The engine is finally empty. There are neglected projects around the house. But all the way home I kept seeing dark masses moving on the bottom of a summer lake. How am I supposed to make her understand that?