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Despite this we stay for January 2, 2014

Ice fishing

 HUERFANO — For those of you who love to fish, there are really only two options for fishing after December first. You either go to Lake Okeechobee in Florida, or you go ice fishing. It may seem like going to Florida is a really extreme solution to your fishing jones, but, trust me, in the long run it’ll be cheaper, less stressful, and warmer than ice fishing. First of all, when you go ice fishing, you have to sit on ice. So unless you are one of those ding-dongs who swim in ice water on New Year’s Day, sitting on ice gets kind of cold. Oh, sure, you can wear lots of clothes. You can wear seventeen layers of clothes, but some part of you will still get really cold. Maybe it will be your knees, maybe your fingers, or worst of all your toes, but the numbing cold of those body parts will drive you stark raving mad, because you won’t be able to warm them up, no matter what you do, because, again, you’re sitting on ice. You may think that eating lunch will warm you up slightly, or even distract you from your frozen appendages. But NO. Your once-warm and inviting lunch, lovingly prepared in the early morning hours, has frozen solid because . . . it’s been sitting on the ice. The other noteworthy fact is, while you’re on top of the ice, the fish are under the ice. You have to figure out how to get a baited hook from here to there. You could take a pickaxe and whack at the ice for ten or twelve hours, or you could drag a four-hundred-pound auger onto the ice. This leads me to my next observation—you have to drag a lot of stuff out onto the ice. You have to drag so much stuff out there that it takes hours. And then, once you get all your stuff on the ice, you realize you have to go to the bathroom, which is five miles away, on the other side of the lake, uphill both ways. And you have to walk. There is one good thing about ice fishing, at least in this region. You won’t be alone on the ice. You’ll be visited frequently by ravens. They’re always hanging out in the trees, waiting for a load of fish guts to eat. When one raven starts clicking and cawing, they all chime in until the cacophony makes you tear your hair out and, to get away from them, you leap into the hole you just drilled with the auger. Okay, maybe you don’t do that. But you feel like doing that, and you just might end up throwing your now-frozen lunch Twinkies at them, hoping to bean one and make them all shut up. After all this effort, if you’re lucky, you will catch a fish that is big enough to keep. And hey, the ravens are rooting for you.