Class Warfare on Ice
By: Paul Greenberg
Tags: Class Warfare, Inequality, Fishing, Economy, Winter Sports

But the 200-odd anglers who fanned out across Long Pond an hour north of Augusta one frigid morning in late January were a far cry from Roth’s paranoid ice man. The occasion was Long Pond’s first-ever Pike Derby, instituted following the state’s decision to open the pond to ice anglers despite the protests of shore-property owners. Most of the fishermen were dads and kids. Nearly all of the dads had learned ice fishing from their own dads and they expressed a nostalgic gratitude to a sport that allows a family to fly kites, throw footballs, and catch fish for less than $30 a day.

The Pike Derby’s organizers, Donald and Carla Lynch of nearby St. Albans, are well-versed in fisheries issues; they also have online networking skills to rival a Howard Dean operative. As affiliate members of the Wisconsin-based ice anglers’ website IceShanty.com, they summoned the flash-frozen mob to Long Pond entirely via the Internet. Standing on 20 inches of ice in -10 degree temperatures the morning of the derby, Don cheerfully chatted with contestants about the odds of a state-record fish being pulled out. Then his beeper went off.

“A fish!” he said shutting off the flashing light on his new electronic fish-trap. He sprinted across the ice, grabbed the line, and pulled in the first pike of the derby. The green-and-yellow fish flopped twice and then froze into a baseball bat with fins. “He’s not big,” said Lynch, “but it’s a start.”

IceShanty.com’s 8,500 registered users are not the first to try to spread the gospel of ice. But the books produced from within the community are markedly different from those written by outside observers in two ways. The first is that they are largely out of print. The second is their unabashed mission to convince the reader that ice fishing is worth doing at all.

In the introduction to “Ice Fishing for Everybody” (1948), one of the earliest books devoted entirely to the sport, Byron W. Dalrymple laments the widespread “dread and distaste of the discomforts which low temperatures bring” and urges potential sportsmen to “cast off prejudice and listen with an open mind.” In “Ice Fishing: A Complete Guide” (1992), Jim Compossela paints a romantic vision of a night in a frozen hut: “Bring your lover,” he muses, “and dine on duchesse potatoes and Cajun-style perch cooked on the ice.”

Every generation’s hard-water bard announces that technology has at long last defeated cold. Dalrymple writes, “A very great many kinds of jackets, Arctic overall suits, sheeplined boots, leather garments, etc., are slowly becoming available which previous to the war were never even heard of.” Jerry Chiapetta’s 1965 book “ABCs of Modern Ice Fishing” claims, “There are one-piece subzero suits which are relatively inexpensive, lightweight, comfortable, and even colorful and stylish.” And in the 1998 video “Ice Fishing Secrets II,” Doug Stange tells us, “There’s no reason to be cold out there any more.”

All of these books and videos convey an unavoidable truth: Ice fishermen deeply and truly love ice, even after they’ve fallen through. Paul Jacques, Maine’s deputy commissioner of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife still ice fishes ardently even though he fell through one night. “It just takes your breath away. But the key is you don’t panic. You panic and you’re probably gonna die. Once I hit the bottom I kinda looked up and I could see a spot that was lighter . . . I just pushed up and when I come up out of that hole I just put my hands on the ice and got myself up there and rolled until I hit the trees.”

Harold F. Blaisdell, in the ice fishing entry to the 1980 edition of McLain’s Fishing Encyclopedia, gets closest to the feeling: “Perhaps the greatest single source of fascination is the drastic change in the relationship between man and water brought about by the dramatic appearance of the ice itself. The waters which now lie hidden beneath the frozen surface immediately become a dark, sealed-off mystery and thus pose a tantalizing and compelling challenge to the fisherman.”

Or, as one Long Pond Pike Derby contestant put it, “You never know what’s gonna come up through that hole.”