Why do we ice fish? by Jeff Ell

Note: This article was originally published for the Adirondack Express.

An American reporter made the mistake of asking Boris Yeltsin why he liked to ice fish. Yeltsin glared at the reporter for a moment; his Slavic scowl rife with disgust and disdain for having been asked such an idiotic question.

“If you had ever been you would never ask,” Yeltsin said.

He turned away, and looked for another reported who might be able to ask him a real question.

But with all due respect to the deceased, I think it’s a perfectly good question. A question that will be asked as long as folks insist on spending their days on frozen lakes. A question we will try to answer over the next few weeks as we plumb the depths of this mysterious sport.

First, in the interest of full disclosure and unbiased journalism I want the reader to know that I am an ice fisherman. I will do my best to present a fair and balanced view of the sport. But, it’s possible my perspective and prejudges may inadvertently color our discussion.

It’s likely that my love for the sport stems from childhood. For it was then, while attending an Indian Guide winter overnighter with my father, that I had my first ice fishing experience. We went to a camp with heated bunk houses and rustic cafeteria. The property had all the usual camp amenities, including access to a small lake down the hill from the main lodge.

There were all kinds of father and son activities to keep us entertained. Tobogganing, shivering, ice ball chucking, peeing your name in the snow, unthawing by the fire, to name a few. But the main event was the father son ice fishing derby. Sadly, my father was not an ice fisherman, and so when we walked out onto the frozen lake to observe the contest we felt a bit overwhelmed by all the fathers and son teams who had ice augers and tip ups.

My father might not have been an ice fisherman, but he was and is resourceful. So after looking over the situation we walked back to our Plymouth Valiant and dug around till he found a spool of old mono-filament line and some single hooks that were left over from some fair weather fishing we had done that summer.

Along the way my dad pinched a piece of two-by-four from a wood pile and we headed down to the lake. My dad is also a good beggar. He panhandled another father who gave us a minnow, and then commandeered an unused hole. He wound the line around the board, hooked on the minnow, and dumped it in the lake. We were in the tournament.

All around us flags were popping up. Happy boys and their dads were pulling pickerel from the lake. Meanwhile our sad line sat motionless in the hole. Any false hope of actually catching a fish faded as sun sank lower and we got colder. Teams started packing up and taking their fish back to the lodge to get weighed in. We left our rig in the hole and went back to our cabin to get ready for dinner.

On the way over to dinner about an hour later, I asked if I could go back to the lake to see if we caught anything. He said sure and headed over to the lodge to get in line for supper, while I ran down the hill.

When I got to the lake the only people left on the ice were some locals who were perch fishing. As I got to our hole I saw the two by four off to the side, and a guy jigging in our hole. He apologized, saying he thought our 2X4 was just a piece of junk. But there in the slush, still hooked, was a big pickerel. I stood in disbelief as the guy told me that the fish was on the line when he moved the board.

I snatched the fish, left the board, and ran up the hill with my monster. My dad (who still loves telling this story) says that as I came through the double doors, the whole assembly turned to see who was letting in the cold air. Dinner was being served, and they were announcing the winners of the ice fishing contest in reverse order.

The entire tribe let out a collective gasp when they saw that fish. The guy on the microphone saw it and said,  “Gentleman it looks like we might have another entry.”

I was ushered to the front of the cafeteria, every eye watching while the derby officials verified what everyone already knew. We had won the derby.

The picture in this week’s column was taken the next day when we got back home. The fish was frozen as solid as the smile on my face. We even ate it, picking those tiny Y bones out with every victorious bite. We told the story over and over to my brothers and sisters and anyone else who would listen.

Some where I still have the trophy commemorating the win. The trophy, if we can call it that, is nothing more than a fish shape piece of felt with a magic marker inscription. It reads “First Place.” Thanks, pop.

Venison Virgin

If the bodies of the approximately three million white-tail deer harvested annually in America were to be laid end to end, the column would stretch from New York to San Francisco. If we added in the elk, antelope, moose, mule-deer and black-tail deer, we would be well on our way to a complete round trip. Yet in spite of these amazing numbers, the vast majority of Americans have never intentionally killed something for food, or for that matter, ever even seen it happen.

The closest the average person gets to a real kill is a glimpse of a carcass lashed to a car top on the interstate. Or perhaps while hiking this autumn they will hear the echo of a gun shot in the mountains.  With each passing year, our culture drifts further from personal knowledge of where our meat comes from and how we get it. We forget that even our grannies knew how to wring the neck of Sunday dinner.

I think sometimes that it is our sterilized existence that has made us sterile; made it easy for us turn away from conflict, robbed us of passion; and caused us to kneel before stainless steel altars bleached clean from anything that might offend.

So I wonder. Is there a place for hunting in our world? A place to vicariously gain a deeper appreciation for sacredness of blood? What are the consequences, especially for young men, of this disconnect from hunting? I wonder if mooring ropes that once tied us to our ancestors’ knowledge of sacrifice and death are now entangled in something even more gruesome?

Perhaps we have become like the man who fell into the river while trying to run out of the rain. We have succeeded in avoiding the drops of guts and gore. But we have fallen head-long into a river of factory grown meat that is executed by hired guns, and then butchered by our surrogates.

Our hands are clean, and we politely grimace at the sight of road kill. But our hearts have forgotten ancient truth, and we have lost the ability to correctly appraise the value of blood.

___________

I’m an adult-convert to hunting.  Like ninety-five percent of Americans, I didn’t grow up in a hunting culture. I grew up in a world of curbs, carpools, standardized tests and weedless lawns. But all that changed when we moved out to the country and pioneered a church where some of our congregation lived in trailers on gravel roads, where one of our older members got her buck every year.

Eventually I succumbed to the culture and found myself in the new hunter safety course. I got a license to kill. For the first five seasons the deer had nothing to fear. I  stumbled through the woods, sat up wind on the edge of fields, and followed week-old tracks. But with each meatless season, I learned a little something.

Then on a clear October evening, I sat quietly shivering in the brush next to a meadow. A fawn came out to feed, followed by its mother. The doe walked toward me, lifting her head to listen and sniff the air every few steps, but the breeze was in my face. I squeezed the trigger, she kicked and thrashed for a few seconds and then lay motionless in the grass.

I  lost my venison virginity that night and shouted for joy, my rifle held above my head. I carefully tore out the tag on my license: the first big game badge on my way to rural manhood.

I stayed in the brush for a good long while, remembering the safety course instructor’s admonishment to wait before approaching a kill. I took the time to recall the field dressing diagram in the manual: a cartoon deer with cuts along the dotted line marks in its chest and anus. I thought about finding a friend who would gut her for me.

It was getting dark when I walked out into the clearing. The eyes of that doe looked tender. Big doe eyes with long lashes that would never again blink at her little orphan. I rolled her onto her back, my hands trembled as I unsheathed the knife and slipped it into her pure white belly.

Since then, I’ve killed dozens of deer. My finger has pulled the trigger, and my hands have been warmed by internal organs. I’ve felt the texture of lungs (if you must know, it feels like unset Jello mixed with shredded pineapple). I’ve held a heart in my hand.  It’s tight, pure muscle, like a strong man’s bicep. The liver feels like a giant leech, porous and slippery.  I’ve been up to my elbow in the cavity of a body.

Since then, I’ve also become a better butcher. I’ve learned not to nick the stomach or bladder. I’ve learned to drag the deer to a slope because it is so much easier to spill out guts when gravity is on your side. Also, if you can, try to cut all the way through the sternum, that way you can slice the esophagus close to the tongue. And remember, some states require that you leave the genitals on when you’re transporting the animal. Don’t worry, you can cut them off when you get home and feed them to your dog.

Don’t run to your freezer and toss out your red and white protein just yet.

_____________

Before I was a hunter, I read about our slaughtered Lamb and imagined His blood over the door of my life. I prayed over the Lord’s table and heartily sang about a fountain filled by severed veins washing away sin in a crimson flood. But I sang and prayed without personal experience. Killing connected me with truth in a way cellophane wrapped cutlets could not.

If you’ve kept your vow never to eat anything with a face, I respect that. But understand that vegan philosophy doesn’t mesh well with Biblical revelation. No amount of revisionist scrubbing can clean the Old Testament fingers that point at a bloodied Messiah. The Lord God skinned an animal to clothe the first couple in furry bikini bottoms. Abraham walked between slabs of sacrifice, and Solomon slaughtered 142,000 animals to dedicate the temple.

Jesus ate lamb and fish. He knew sacrifice was messy. He knew blood was sacred. He knew that Larry and Bob types can’t atone for humanity.

It’s not just the weight of revelation that makes it so very difficult for me to embrace a meatless lifestyle, it’s the hypocrisy. Vegan royalty preaches green dogma from organic towers, but their voices are drowned out by the cries of millions of unborn Abels buried behind their lines. Hyper-masticating hipsters rarely see past their vanity rims and walk away from the contradictions of their split tongued prophets.

Call us rednecks, that’s fair. Label us Neanderthals, that’s OK too. We have our own blind spots that need correcting. But if you wear leather or eat flesh, then don’t think me or any other hunter barbaric or evil. I can’t speak for the others in my endangered tribe, but on that night I clumsily stuck my knife into the flesh of a warm mammal, it deepened my understanding of The Sacrifice.

___________

Hunting advocates have been attempting to spread their sport to women and minorities. But the profile of a hunter remains as cliché as ever: a white male with a blue collar job. He owns a pickup and lives outside of the city limits and suburban sprawl.  From man caves in Paleolithic France until today, little has changed.  Males in general seem to be fascinated with killing.

With every passing year, the pool of young men who would have grown up to be hunters shrinks, while the average age of the remaining hunters rises. It’s the inevitable confluence of increased urbanization, factory farming, and a screen-oriented generation. There is little hope that our cultural disconnect with hunting will turn around anytime soon.

Still little boys play politically incorrect games like cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers.  They turn sticks into guns, and stones into hand grenades, and their mothers can’t stop them. Young men play Halo and blast each other with paintballs. Seems that killing is embedded in Nimrod’s nephews. Killing has become a game; little is sacred in that world.

Yet the taking of human life wounds the soul. My old friend’s eyes still fill with tears when they tell me their stories of war. Maybe its why some of the men and widows of previous generations more correctly appraise the price of human blood. Maybe it’s why they don’t play shooter games.

This is the essence of conundrum, there is no middle ground between gaming screen and the killing field; no safe, legal place to shed blood and smell its sacredness. No place for our children can learn that when you pull the trigger in the real world, there is no reset button.

____________

It was hot this summer, and one July night I fell asleep under an air conditioner. The coolness and rush of air induced dreams of antlers dancing above the brush, coyotes running in fields, and camouflaged friends leaning against pickups. I dream often of the hunt.

If I were born a thousand years ago, I would have danced in the firelight and jabbed my spear into the smoke. I would have slapped my painted hand on the wall and drawn exaggerate pictographs of my trophies antlers. If I were born two hundred years ago, I would have disappeared over the Cumberland Gap. I would have left my family to poach  the vast hunting grounds on the other side of the Appalachians.

Alas, I am a modern man, born too late as some would suggest. So now the hunting license has become my passport to the old world and visa to antiquity. A seasonal  portal where I can step back in time and follow a fading trail where Gore-Tex, Vibram, buckskin and feather meld on ancient path.

Any day now a breeze will fall from the north, the leaves will turn, and the killing will begin. I  will change. My pace will slow, and I will walk toe to heal; the leash of connectivity will go slack. I will crouch, listen, and sniff the air. I will look at nothing and watch everything. I will fade into the forest and become a wisp of a man drifting through the mountains. I will gently squeeze the trigger.

Truth, Justice, and the MMA Way

Note: This article was originally published for the Burnside Writers Collective.

It’s probably not right for a pastor to watch MTV. Especially when it shows people getting beat up in an eight sided ring by professional cage fighters. So I’m confessing that my favorite show is an MTV reality series called Bully Beat Down. The premise of the show goes like this: guys who have been bullied send in videos documenting their stories. Bullied young men who have had their arms broken, faces scarred and noses bent tell how local thugs have tormented them. They tell stories of being afraid to walk in their own neighborhoods and being humiliated in front of their friends and family. One victim needed anal surgery after a bully gave him an atomic wedgie.

After airing the video, the show’s host visits the bully on his own turf. He shows up with the victim and TV cameras rolling, baiting the bully into accepting the challenge to fight a professional mixed martial artist for a chance to earn ten thousand dollars. The thought of easy money and the psychological pressure of wanting to save face in front of one’s friends are too much for the bully to resist. Time and time again they accept the offer to mix it up with a MMA.

On fight day, the bully steps into the octagon with someone who is completely out of his league—a scarred and inked professional who knows how to punch and choke in a way no amateur could ever imagine. For the next six minutes the bully gets beaten and humiliated. With every tap out and knockout, the ten grand gets handed over to the victim who is watching from the stands.

Invariably, the bullies also have a change in heart: they discover being on the other side of a beatdown isn’t much fun. After they puke, which many of them do, they shake hands with their victims and apologize. Funny how a beating often precedes repentance, how retribution ushers in reconciliation, and how the experience of being bullied improves our vision to notice those who need our protection.

Growing up, we had a bully in our neat suburban neighborhood. His name was Brian and he was about four years older than I. He taunted, teased, pushed, cussed and punched younger boys like me in the stomach. Getting punched in the stomach is so humiliating. You loose your breath, double over, and when you’re little, you cry. You can’t run away or fight back because you can’t breathe. Brian would invade our pickup games on the street and slowly circle us, deciding who the victim of the day would be.

We tried to appease him with sheepish hellos or pretend to be distracted and not notice him. My throat would lump up as we waited for him to make his selection. As much as anyone hates to admit it, there’s a certain amount of relief when the shark grabs your friend, or the bully beats another kid. It’s a guilty relief, to be sure — survivor’s guilt — but we can’t pretend we are not relieved when someone else gets it. We’re just glad it’s not us.

I have two older brothers who would have protected me, but during Brian’s reign of terror, they weren’t around much. They had gotten too old for playing on the streets, and like other guys their age, they had taken part-time jobs at fried chicken places and started to play guitar and chase girls. Now that I think about it, the absence of older brothers was the one thing all of Brian’s victims had in common.

I remember one evening in particular. We were playing baseball at the bottom of the street like we did all summer. Home plate was a man hole cover and first and third bases were sycamore trees on the streets edge. Second base was another manhole cover that was out of line with home and too far into center field. From above, our field would have looked more like an asphalt-covered tear drop than grassy diamond, but it worked.

Also, we actually didn’t use a baseball; we used a tennis ball. Tennis balls didn’t break windows and didn’t dent the cars often parked between home and first. It was during one of those inning-less games that Brian came and punched me in the stomach for the last time. As usual I collapsed to my knees, tears filling my eyes, while Brian wandered up the street. Once I caught my breath and recuperated enough to walk, I went sniveling toward home.

On my way I saw my brother Douglas playing Wiffle Ball in the side lawn of our neighbor Pat’s house. He was with his friends. It was an odd occasion for these older guys, but they had run into each other and were goofing around trying to see who could hit the plastic ball over the roof. And there watching them was Brian. My brother saw me coming and then as I got closer he saw that I was crying.

He asked me what had happened, and I told him in choking gasps that Brian had punched me. I pointed my finger, identifying the criminal; the trial was over in a nanosecond. He confessed his guilt by turning and trying to escape, but he was too slow. In a single motion my brother snatched the bat away from his friend and caught up to Brian’s fleeing backside.

The sound of hollow plastic thwapping bare skin was the sweetest sound my ears had ever heard. Brian was wearing shorts. My brother meted out justice by reigning down a series of welt-raising lashes on the back of his naked legs as he tried to flee. Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! Bully Brian covered his butt with his hand and crumbled to the ground. He cowered as my brother stood over him with the yellow staff of justice. I don’t remember seeing Brian after that day; he was too old to be playing on the street anyway.

My brother can’t beat up bullies for me anymore; he has Multiple Sclerosis. But I learned something from him about being a good older brother—about protecting those who can’t defend themselves and speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves. I’m thinking more of us pastor types could learn something from MMA, that in prayer and preaching we should be the ones climbing into the cage and pointing out the bullies.

I also know all humanity has an older Brother who’s not squeamish about meting out justice, who knows a whipping in the temple is a good thing. Maybe it’s why those closest to Him understand justice, and why many have an octagon-shaped hole in their hearts waiting to be filled.