Winter made us feel at home. Skiers and hikers seem comparable to how we enjoyed the season. Sea bass and cod fishermen. Clammers. But all of them are on the move. Ice fishing Baker’s Basin habitually, we sat by a fire.
We did cut holes with a splitting bar all over Mercer County in New Jersey. I drove a chisel into hollow iron. A homemade scepter. In my station wagon, I drove my two brothers beyond Mercer to Lake Hopatcong, where I broke 1-1/2 feet of ice in heavy wind at 15 degrees. But weekdays after school, the Basin comforted better than had we traveled to Minnesota. The 6-acre mule barge pond from the 19th century, connected to the Delaware and Raritan Canal, drew largemouths in from relative shallows. They held in 10- and 12-foot depths for the winter.
We set tip-ups and jigged those bass. Hanging out by the fire, we drank coffee. We talked wild stuff we’d never think of while listening to Jethro Tull. My inability to remember most of it doesn’t matter. Freedom let all go, except what lodged in the brain stem. We sat where wild men from the previous century congregated for the night before moving on. We never needed alcohol.
Counting the fish we caught into dusk, we kept tip-ups set until we couldn’t see them. It wasn’t all about bass. Following a hunch, I cut a hole over 7 feet of water outside the shallows of the southeast corner. My youngest brother had come along; branches of a fallen tree extended about as deep as I set the live shiner. Two anomalies came together like peanut butter and jelly.
The spot still produced 25 years later. After sunny afternoons, very early in the season bass will hit small Rebels barely twitched on the surface. I fished there a couple of times when visiting my parents. The place was overgrown and ignored. Access much more difficult, I whacked my way through by forcing my arms. Something in me resists the grace of society.
As my younger brother, friends, and I packed to leave, the flag of the tip-up set in the corner went up. Ricky—the brother—took hold. He got a 20-inch pickerel on ice. We celebrated a high mood and rode away in the dark.
Almost always, ice action at the Basin came at a quick pace. With so many bass wintering over, the ease felt tantalizing. We almost felt we belonged to the Elect. No one else seemed to know about those fish. Today, no one else would dare go. We caught bass, pulled the hooks, and set the fish free, never fearing any loss of their numbers. The canal flowed by. Usually under ice. Snow on top had the innocence of short life. I remember the wood most of all. We burned it as if to remember the smell lifetimes later. Centuries will pass. I’ll come back to the Basin and build a fire. In the depth of solitude, I’ll think of distant history and not know I was part of it.
My friend Steve and I stood by a fire after hours of waiting, boredom plaguing us on a Saturday when we had the time. As I remember, no other outing involved waiting so long. It felt about time to give up, but we lingered in abject dismay. Someone had to say something.
“I wish we would get a flag,” Steve stated the obvious. “You look at the tip-ups and they seem to stare back at you.”
“I’m looking straight at that one there, and it seems as dead as a tree to me,” I said.
Steve said, “It looks like doing something.” Just then something came over me. I lifted my right arm with a sweeping gesture like a flag going up just as a tip-up tripped, sounding off quietly as the flag lifted. And just before I had begun lifting that arm, and before I saw the tip-up spring, I had begun saying, “All of a sudden, ding!”
My right hand risen above my chest, that flag of the tip-up we both stared at had risen in the same instant. Holding my raised hand in place, I saw the flag bob slightly to one side and then to the next before it too stayed in place, a bass having struck in perfect synchrony with my sudden mood.
