Ice Fishing With Dynamite

Reading BeachGoat's "Where Are Your Eyebrows?" brought back a lot of memories. Some of them are worth writing down.

Before it all got covered over with condos and McMansions the area I grew up in was rural farm country. It was mostly produce and dairy farms with a few beef, horse and chicken ranches thrown in for variety. As kids, except for during really extreme weather conditions, we pretty much lived outside all year long. By extreme I mean the wind chill had to be about 40 below and zero visibility.

One of the favorite activities in my neighborhood was fishing. Spring and fall were for trout, summer was for bass and winter was for whatever we could catch through the ice. For the most part we were pretty sporting about it and pretty much followed the rules.

Sometimes, though, we didn't. We used generators from old crank telephones to stun fish. Some calcium carbide in a coke bottle or a couple sticks of dynamite was doubly entertaining because it not only knocked out the fish but we got to watch some great explosions. In those, pre-terrorism, days just about every farmer has a case or two of dynamite laying around for blasting stumps and rocks and most of us knew the basics of using it.

The event that I'm writing about took place on a not quite perfect Saturday when I was about 14 or so. By perfect I mean the sky was absolutely clear, the sun was bright, the temperature was hovering around 0 degrees, there was no wind and the ice was about 18 inches thick. It was perfect for ice fishing. So after a bunch of early morning phone calls about 6 of us gathered on a small lake about half a mile from my house and started chopping holes through the ice.

By not quite perfect I mean that the damned fish wouldn't bite. I don't mean they weren't biting much or that we didn't catch many. I mean they really weren't biting. Not a single nibble. Nothing. Nada. By noon we were all getting frustrated because we knew the fish were in there. By 2 PM we had tried every thing we could think of and were starting to get pissed. It was going to be dark in a couple hours. We'd have to go home for dinner. None of us could bear the shame of showing up at home empty handed.

Desperate measures were called for.

We had all dynamited for fish before so after a brief huddle we decided that there wasn't any reason why it wouldn't work now. We could just chop the fish out of the ice when they floated to the surface. It was a totally flawless plan. So one of the guys ran home to grab some dynamite and caps and fuse. Another went along the shore looking for a couple suitable rocks. I went to my tackle box to get pliers and wire and stuff. And the other three just stood around bitching.

In a couple minutes the dynamite and rocks arrived and I went to work. I stuck one end of a three foot long piece of fuse into a cap and carefully crimped it. I poked a hole in one stick of dynamite and inserted the cap. We had three sticks of dynamite so I decided to use them all. I wired the sticks together and then wired the bundle to a rock. I checked to make sure that the bundle and rock would fit through the hole in the ice. It wouldn't so we made the hole bigger. We sure would have felt stupid if we'd wasted the dynamite.

When the hole was ready I knelt beside it while one of the other guys lit the fuse. I let the package gently slide into the deep dark water beneath our feet. As I stood the gang gathered around the hole to wait.

A minute or two seems like an eternity when you're waiting for dynamite to go off.

Finally it did just that.

The results weren't at all what we had expected. You can set off a stick of dynamite in a garbage can without much effect.......if you leave the lid off. If you put the lid on it only takes about an eighth of a stick to blow the crap out of it. The lake was the garbage can. The ice was the lid. And the six of us were standing on it.

We saw the flash about 20 feet below us and instantly felt as if the bottoms of our feet had been hit by a baseball bat. The ice rose about 4 feet and took us with it. At the same time water geysered from all the holes we had chopped. I saw a couple of unlucky bass, a pickerel and a musk rat shoot about 50 feet into the air. We were all instantly soaked with water that froze on contact. Then, as we lay there frozen to the ice we watched a 2 foot high ripple roll outward across the lake.

Four acres of ice 18 inches thick makes a noise that defies description when it rapidly changes state from a solid piece to a giant slushy. And before the echoes faded we found ourselves and all our gear in the drink. The ice water was actually quite a bit warmer than the air but it was still cold enough to kill us in just a few minutes and we knew it.

In those days winter clothes were mostly made out of wool and cotton and that shit gets very heavy when it gets wet. Despite that we swam through / crawled over the ice chips floating on the water and all made it to shore where we stood in our rapidly stiffening clothes. One of the guys lived a bit less than a quarter mile away so we headed for his house. It's surprisingly hard to walk a quarter mile when your clothes weigh about a hundred pounds, your boots are full of ice water and your pants are as stiff as two by fours.

When we got there we went into the tool shed behind the barn. The plan was to light the wood stove, warm up, dry our clothes and, with luck, get home before dinner. We carefully stacked up the kindling and got the wood ready and then discovered that all of our matches were soaked and frozen. It took about ten minutes of searching before we found a couple of packs in one of the tool boxes. By then we had all gone beyond the traditional blue and were turning all sorts of interesting colors. Fortunately, frostbite white wasn't among them.

With trembling numb fingers we managed to get the newspaper under the kindling lit. Once the kindling was burning well we put a couple of larger pieces of wood on top and the shed started to warm up. When the temperature near the stove got above freezing we tried to take our frozen clothes off. Not an easy task when the clothes are like plywood and the zippers are frozen solid. It took another fifteen minutes or so for them to thaw out enough so we could strip them off. We got our pants to our knees any way. Then it took another ten minutes to untie our frozen boot laces.

We leaned our clothes against some saw horses and in our still soggy underwear we huddled around the stove. A minute or two later I learned another important fact. It doesn't really hurt much to freeze. It hurts a bit for a few minutes and then you get numb and it stops hurting. Thawing out however hurts like a son of a bitch. It couldn't hurt worse if a horde of demon rats with fiery teeth gnawed your toes and fingers off. It couldn't hurt any worse if flaming Nazis dipped your feet in molten lead. We gritted our teeth and with tears streaming down our faces cheerfully assured each other that it
didn't hurt at all.

Finally, the pain stopped and our clothes had thawed out enough that they fell into a sodden steaming heap on the floor. I shook the water out of my boots and wrung the water out of my clothes as best I could. Then I held them near the stove until they got warm. I put my warm but still wet clothes back on and braved the cold again. I was the first to leave. I later learned that the other wimps had stayed until their stuff was completely dry. They didn't get home until almost 8 PM and got a whole ration of shit for being out so late.

I trudged home through the freezing air with the sky growing steadily darker,
surrounded by a sort of mobile fog bank caused by the steam rising from my hot wet coat. I was pissed because I hadn't caught a fish and had lost my gear including my old man's favorite ice chopper and my favorite sled that I had used to haul all my stuff to the lake.

My coat was just starting to freeze again when I walked through the front door only about 15 minutes late. My mom asked me what had happened an all I told her was that I had fallen through the ice and lost all my stuff. To this day she has no idea what really happened.