by Zach Harvey
Standing out in my driveway, face frozen nearly immobile, body just starting to sweat beneath a half-dozen layers, I survey my progress over 45 minutes behind the shovel–and feel a familiar twinge.
I’ve dug both cars out, cleared the steps leading to my front and side doors, and carved out tidy, winding paths linking them to any destination my family or I might conceivably need to reach in days ahead.
A normal human being might have breathed a satis ed sigh 10 minutes ago and stuck his shovel into a drift beside the steps, clomped inside for a hot cup of tea.
Not me. I’m a New Englander, year-round, by choice–a masochist, a self-styled martyr maybe. You’d think that if you lived elsewhere, where in some ways the climate is a bit less, well, hostile.
I mention this because we’re trudging headlong into the cruelest months here on the frozen tundra, a time when even the hardiest among us, having discovered a fresh hole in his right boot while standing shins- deep in slush, or having stalled out atop a highway bridge because the piping north wind has turned the diesel in his tank into low-sulphur Italian ice, will face the unavoidable, annual reckoning of northern winter. To paraphrase: Who in the @#$% thought living in this dreadful, frozen @#$% nightmare was a @#$% good @#$% idea?!
Over the last decade or so, following a few memorable frozen-wasteland meltdowns, I have done a good bit of soul-searching about my choice to stay here on the tundra, regardless of the many ways doing so makes life exponentially more complicated.
Call me a fruitloop or a philosopher-hippie moron, but winter here on the icy wasteland has, in various ways, made me a better fisherman, and solidified my deep and abiding love of my home waters and all the species that pass through over a 12-month cycle.
In fact–here comes the crazy part–where my own career choices have given me countless opportunities to flee the tundra during the Blast Freezer months at home, I must admit that destination fishing for famously exotic gamefish has never really captured my imagination. Call me ungrateful, a rube, a @#$% fool, even, but when I’m fishing distant waters, I feel strangely disconnected. I think of the many tourists for whom I gaffed a 45-pound bass or netted a 12-pound doormat–remember them asking me, while toward the bow 20 other sets of eyes rolled, “Gosh, is that a big one or something?” I care about what lives within reach, and fish for food first and foremost. I have no delusions about tournament glory, or my own migratory instincts and the probability of my ever joining the snowboard flock. I live here. I fish here.
As seasons have rolled by, I’ve watched deckmates develop serious obsessions with the shaky proposition of ice fishing here in southern New England. It’s taken me some years, but I’m starting to understand, generally from a polite distance, the intrigue.
In my world, where the possibility of winter cod fishing holds more immediate appeal, I’ve learned that the dark months cod fishery is best viewed as a surprise bonus on the rare occasions when fishable conditions and catchable numbers of local ground fish align.
An unfortunate byproduct of my years fishing full-time and year-round has been my policy that when it’s 15 degrees and blowing NW 25 to 30, I won’t ship out unless there’s a substantial day’s pay in the works.
So I tend to be persnickety about the timing of winter sinker-bouncing or jig-slinging exploits for fun–advance planning a major challenge, according to all the documented shortcomings of winter forecasting.
Truth is, I love time on or beside the winter ocean, regardless of the rod and reel. Fresh cod or ling is a treat, but pounds of fillet have always been a secondary currency of the winter fishery. I’m after the sorely needed reprieve from the great indoors, and more so that all-important jolt to my normal mindset–the gray expanse of icy Northwest Atlantic always a powerful reminder of just how minute the winter bills, my other worries, and I are in the grand scheme of life and death at temperate latitudes.
Speaking of, here on the wrong side of age 40, I’m realizing that winter, not as a line-up of new target species or fishing challenges, but as a forced pause and a hard-wired annual reset, defines us as fishermen and seafarers. Winter, the urgency with which we fish its approach, the fire with which we greet new life each spring, conditions us to make the most of every angling development, and gives us a heightened awareness of overlapping seasonal rhythms.
Meanwhile, back here on planet cold, the blistering chill, especially days the freeze is wind-powered, has been a major (if counterintuitive) boon for the ice-obsessed, who, after a couple years of short-lived or non-existent hard water, have watched solid footing speed across local lakes and ponds.
Naturally, what makes grand ice fishing tends not to overjoy the guys trying to get something going, economically, around whatever codfish have filled in on the wrecks, ledges, and rubble in the vicinity of 30 fathoms.
Of course, given the rate at which weather patterns have been slingshotting to and fro across the 40-year averages, there’s no telling what will have unfolded by the time you read this–or what may soon take shape.
For the moment, I’m bundled up, and running warm a er swinging the shovel for the better part of an hour. A better adjusted man would see that the cars are both clear, that there’s access to anything important without throwing another half-ton of frozen lawn ballast.
Me? Between the six still-functioning nerves in my face and my barometric left foot, I can feel the wind swinging more northerly all the time now–a truly evil cold front drafting into town in the wake of the storm. I’m not loving the shovel, but the thing I know I’ll like a whole lot less is this same snow under a two-inch shell of deep freeze in the a.m.
There’s weather and there’s water and the wind’s coming on and I’m still standing in my boots and trying to stay ahead of it all. For a man ashore, rods racked for the moment, I still feel eerily like a fisherman.
by Zach Harvey
