Hooked, line and sinker, on ice fishing

Ice fishing. I tried it for the first time two weekends ago and all I’ve thought about since is how much fun I had and “When can we go again?”

Where have I been all my life that I didn’t try ice fishing until now? I live in northwestern Ontario for crying out loud!

And not only did I just have my inaugural experience with the sport, but it also was only the second time I’d ever been in a vehicle on a frozen lake ice road and the first time I’d gotten out and walked on water I might sail on one day or drive a motor boat across. How cool was that!

I’ve often written ‘I don’t get out much.’ I never realized until now just what that meant in the context of my evidently small bubble world.

I risk guffaws when I say that the entire ice fishing experience drew as much awe from me as when a small child realizes that Santa Claus just left presents under the Christmas tree. It’s the truth.

I’m 53 and for the first time I watched a manual-driven ice auger go through the ice like it was cutting butter—the volcano of ice shavings pouring forth from the blades loud in their sawing and then muffled by the choke of the icy blue below. Amazing.

I remember staring at that 15-20 second process and saying “Wow!” over again as if I had just seen something magic happen. (Like I said, I don’t get out much.)

And then there was the ice fishing hut, green canvas, and wooden floor, carried across the ice as a suitcase and unfolded like a charm. Suddenly my small bubble world was located in the middle of a frozen lake and included a cozy shelter and a heater. What could be better than that?

And there we were inside, he and I, each of us with an ice fishing pole and a hole—and oh! —did I mention I had a chair to rest my bones upon, and hut temperatures that allowed me to remove my mitts and hat while outside the mercury crawled up the thermometer to -20C? Awesome.

Sunlight reached through snow-covered ice—who knew!—and the ice hole lit up and the minnow on my hook, on its way down down down, glowed until I couldn’t see it anymore. It was a thing of beauty inside the dark hut space. Amazing.

“Fishy Fishy bite my hook. You be the captain, I’ll be the cook.”  (Yes, I actually chanted that a few times.)

I’ve read the ice fishing advice that suggests that the best thing about ice fishing, especially if you’re getting into it for the first time, is that you don’t need a lot of equipment. True, particularly if a fishing partner like mine brings all the stuff I need, including chocolate.

But that wasn’t the best thing about ice fishing, especially for a first-timer like me. The best part, the part I will never forget, was pulling up my line with my hands, in what seemed like a forever moment, and spotting the fish I hooked, lit up in the light of the ice hole like a piece of gold as I pulled it through.

Now that, folks, was a Kodak moment.

What I still know to be true

Just the other day during a quiet moment on the drive home from a wonderful day of snowshoeing, my good friend gently said to me,  “and you have an anniversary coming up?”

I turned my head in his direction with a curious stare of pause.

“An anniversary? No. No anniversary,” I replied, returning to look upon the road to home.

My intuitive friend is a gem, and he knows what is coming. Alas, so do I.

Yet, I was trying to convince myself that two years post would allow the day to pass without feeling it so much. 

Who was I kidding? I’m certainly not kidding my friend, and if he’s clued in, then I’m certainly unable to kid myself either.

As much as I would like to believe there is no anniversary, no annual observation of a past event, I would be in denial or naïve, or both, if I awoke January 19^th and didn’t face what that day means in the journal of my life.

“Courtney,” who writes ‘athoughfulplaceblog.com’ penned exactly what I am feeling now, and I applaud her insightful words.

“I am not one to sugar coat and I am not one to avoid that which is so clearly in my face. Since the very day [two years ago] I have chosen to walk, crawl, wade, and trudge through the grief. I have to own it and build my life within the context of it. I will not let it consume me but rather shape me into the best person I can be.”

All that I am is measured by the year, this being the second one.

I still believe that making it to the anniversary date of any major traumatic event in life is a milestone of legendary proportions and each of us comes to it in different ways.

I also believe it is a sacred journey. No one but me can decide how to take each step towards healing.

January 19^th, a part of me wants to walk out into the yard at 4:30 p.m. to the spot where life changed in an instant and where I can stand and try to make sense of things.

My good and caring friend thinks it might be a day to instead do good things for myself—take a warm foot bath, a good book in hand, and enjoy some chocolate.

He would, of course, be correct.  

Once again, I am going to get up at sunrise and live the day as fully as I can. I am alive. I am here. I am full of possibility.

I continue to read “The Language of Letting Go,” by Melody Beattie, my nightingale of freedom.

There’s not a morning that goes by where Ms. Beattie doesn’t impress upon me a valuable lesson about giving up control. I let life in and it unfolds before me.

“Sometimes, it takes more courage to do the ordinary things in life than it does to walk to the door of the airplane and jump.”

Bad things happen in life—now there’s a no brainer.

“What matters is not what happens to us, but how we react to it. You can sit around and complain to your friends about how unfair life is, or you can get up, put the empty bowl in the dishwasher, and go fill up your life.”

I have the courage to live my life, to walk my path every day, right where I am. And if I don’t, I will try again tomorrow.

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Free to choose my own path

What if I had turned left in the hallway at the college I was attending in the fall of 1980? 

What if I had turned left and found a lounge chair in a window vestibule and plopped myself there during a cancelled class instead of going to the cafeteria for a big cornmeal muffin and a coffee.

If I had turned left on that November morning some 33 years ago, how would my life be different today? 

If I had turned left I wouldn’t have met the man I married a year later, after we met in the college cafeteria that day. If I had turned left, I wouldn’t have been punched during that marriage, which ultimately ended it, even though I spent seven more years in it trying to muster the courage to stand up.

I would venture to guess that I am not the only one who has wished at some point in life that I could go back in time and change something in order to get a better outcome. 

I think that’s part of the human experience—wishing things could be different sometimes—and fantasizing, or obsessing perhaps, about how if given the chance to do it over again how we would change a thing.

If I had turned left 33 years ago it would have changed everything, perhaps resulted in some happier times, but also would have denied me the birth of my three beautiful daughters. So, no, I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Besides, that marriage not only gave me motherhood, it also taught me that I am courageous and brave hearted.

I believe in the butterfly effect—that anomalous, mysterious interconnected web to which we all belong. If we truly could go back and change something in our past, it would change everything, as we know it to be in our present day.

I wouldn’t do it.

Melody Beattie says it is easy to romanticize what we don’t know. I venture to say it also is easy to romanticize the past too. But I think it is much more productive to make a storyboard for tomorrow where possibility is alive and well.  

I guess all this fodder has come up to greet me because it’s a new year and I want to meet it fully, and because I am approaching another of those cold memory days that a part of me begs to rewrite. Frankly, I don’t want to because that would change today and I have some very good things in my “now.”

And as Beattie writes, and I concur, “Life is a high-risk sport, and I may become injured along the way. I agree that all the decisions I make are mine and mine alone, including how I choose to handle the events that are beyond my control.”

I am in fact about to sign a page-long waiver that Beattie created, as my new year’s resolution—one that will help me take responsibility for the choices I’m going to make in my life this year.

Left or right, it’s up to me the path I choose.