It’s dark now, but light enough to see that the sky and the ice and the horizon are the same dull gray. I think he’s in there. He has to be in there, even though he shouldn’t be. Who would be? Not me. Not you. We are not him, in fact, we are nothing like him. It is dark still, but he’s in there. He’s either sitting on a white paint bucket tipped upside down, or he’s sitting on a folding chair, the kind that stows in a small nylon bag in the trunk of your car or the hall closet, not the kind with woven plaid straps that our grandparents had on their decks, or porches.
He hasn’t been in there for long, our friend. Just a week ago there was only water there, and no surface tension could ever hold that wooden hut. When the ice formed one night, he drove by it, as I did. I stopped and glared at that new ice, muttering to myself about its intolerable existence. He stopped too, but he didn’t glare at it. His eyes lit up, and likely so did his cigarette, and when he took the first step on it two days later he grew even more excited. He pulled deeper on his cigarette. “Monday”, he said. “I’ll drag the shack out there Monday”. And to celebrate that thought, he pulled even deeper.
And when Monday came he did just that. He dragged that hut out there, maybe by himself, but probably with a friend. His ice fishing friend. I’m sure he has one or more of those. They aren’t friends all the time, not in summer or fall, but they are friends when that first two inches of ice bears their weight. When they towed the shack out there on that afternoon many people stopped in their cars to watch. They were watching, waiting. Wondering if those two friends and their wooden shed would make it to where they were going in. How far were they going to go? Is there enough ice? Are they fools? This is what people were wondering, every one of them. The answers to those questions wouldn’t be known, not by those people in their cars. Even by the two friends only the answer to the first question was known.
They pulled that shed, and they got hot when they were doing it. Sheds slide easily on ice, but if they hadn’t strapped on their ice cleats, the ones they got in their stockings four years ago this last Christmas, they wouldn’t have been able to push and pull properly. It’s a traction issue. Even so, they were getting tired. It was cold out, but not so cold that they didn’t sweat. When the shed was close enough to the place where they’d fish, to the place where they always fish or to the place where they once fished and caught more than one fish, then they stopped pushing. If they kept pushing, gliding and scratching over deeper and deeper water, more people would have gathered in their cars and more questions would have been asked, even though the question repeated would have been one that was already asked earlier, by one of the other people. Are they fools?
Once the shed was where it needed to go, the two friends went inside. They took turns drilling holes in the ice. Probably two, but maybe three. They tipped their buckets upside down, far away from the day when they first opened those buckets and they were full of paint. The color was wrong, but that doesn’t matter now. If they didn’t tip their buckets upside down they did slide their chairs out of the nylon sleeves and set the chairs close to two of the possibly three holes that were just drilled. There isn’t much ice down there, but there’s enough. Water pushed through the holes and covered that thin ice.
They probably caught blue gills on that first day. They went out yesterday too. And today, right now, this early on a foggy January morning, they’re probably in there, Fishing, talking, smoking. The heater that they brought with is on, and they’re warm. They know that people are still stopping on the side of that road, wondering what those people are doing in that hut. Are there even people in there? Is there enough ice? And if there are people in that little wooden shed, the one that one of the friends made eight years ago out of leftover plywood and 2 x 4s from his neighbors addition and mismatched nails that clung together in a red and rusted coffee tin, are they fools?
I know one thing. I know these friends are not in that hut sending emails to clients. I’m sure of it. I suppose there’s no way to know for sure, from this distance and without binoculars, but I’m pretty sure. If this curiosity absorbed me and I raced home for a binoculars and returned to the shed later when the sun was higher, what would the other people in their cars think? Why would I need to know what was going on in that hut? Is it really so important whether or not one of those friends, or both of them, are emailing someone from their phones? There’s no way they are. They’re just sitting on those buckets with their propane heater blowing too hot, and a pile of blue gills mounting on the ice on the other side of their two, maybe three, holes. There still isn’t much ice down there.
Soon the ice will melt. Foggy mornings will be more common, and the late morning winds will blow and they will push the ice against itself. It has no other choice, and ice will crush ice and soon enough it will all be gone. The two friends won’t be there anymore, because one evening some time not far from now they’ll have to leave their homes late at night to push and drag that shed to the shore. The smooth ice will be slush then, and the only thing people will see as they stop by the side of the road is the sporadic flicker of their flashlights that will slowly, but surely, grow brighter as they near the shore. People will stop their cars, drawn by that nearing
light and they’ll wonder, are they fools?
(I tried to photograph the ice shack on Geneva Bay but I couldn’t see it through the fog. Even if the photo did show the ice shack, I don’t know the guys in it. This is fiction, of sorts. Like Tim Allen’s Michigan commercials and those Michigan billboards.)