Let me get this straight, newcomers think. You people drive a big truck on the ice, drag out a house, cut holes in the floor and turn on a heater. So you can fish?
You know, there're these things called stores, where you buy fish. It's much easier.
But where's the lore? The tradition? The intergenerational bonding?
Deb Larson, a Woodbury event planner, would point out that there's more to fishing than fish. There's the lore. The tradition. The art. The intergenerational bonding!
With the help of artists Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson, she wrote a children's book called "One Frozen Lake," an account of a young child going ice-fishing with his grandfather. We caught up with her to find out what drew her to this Minnesota tradition.
"There's a little town out there! It's utterly fascinating for a child -- drilling the hole, eating the candy bars, everything that goes with that long, unhurried block of time in the shack. And hard water fishing is hard, too -- you can't pick up and move like a boat."
She's speaking of her memories as a kid. "I grew up in an ice fishing family, and my dad and his cronies would go out all the time, and sometimes I would go along. My dad built the ice house himself, which a lot of men used to do back then -- but he would sit outside on a bucket in the middle of the lake, because it was either manly to do that, or too many girls were giggling in the house.
"He started taking my son when he was 7. I was flabbergasted when they left at the crack of dawn, wondering if my son would be bored, but he came back so excited, couldn't wait to go again. How many fish did you catch? None."
