Going Under

The sun was warm on her face as she languished on her kick sled facing south. There the contented woman sat, a slight smile played on her face as she reclined, occasionally opening her eyes to peer at the blaze orange tip ups off in the distance guarding the family's other fishing rods. The fish were not biting hard that day, but she did not care. A ways behind her, in the blue patched fish house her husband had made years before the boys sat in their shirt sleeves close to the heater. It was too crowded in there for the woman, so she ventured off on her own and relaxed, her reveries broken occasionally by the sound of the harmonica, or their fighting. When her husbands snores became too loud, she would stand, and whip a snow ball back at the shack, then return to her own peace. As the day grew on, so did the rumble of snow machines, and all terrain vehicles.

By noon a shanty town had sprung up around her. The group to her right turned a foot ball game on their portable TV. And yet she sat in the middle of the lake, lost in her own little world reading the thick book in her lap, jigging her line. When she wrapped her mitter around her face she could not see anyone, could not see anything with the bright sun shinning down on her except the bobber between her shearling lined feet. When the hoots of the pack of men to the east caused her to lift her cap and watch as they landed a beautiful large fish to the frozen lakes surface, she grinned and tilted her head back and pulled the wool down around her eyes farther. After the men whent back inside their fancy deluxe fishing contraption they had drug on to lake with next years model ATV, she waited and then flung snow balls at their tip ups to spring their warning flags for her own amusement.

Slowly it became quiet again in her little world. As the day wore on her hand reached down for the Thermos at her right And her finger became wet from the water her coffee was sitting in. She ate her pocket of ginger snaps and tapped her foot along to the Areosmith song her kid was butchering on the mouth organ in the windowless shelter behind her. Her foot make a splashing sound and she sat up to look at the puddle that was soaking into her feet. The woman, now fully awake, jumped up and yanked off her head gear and scanned her surroundings. The wooden fish houses, closer to shore where still standing, but without a single automobile next to them. A few ATVs were along side the plastic or canvas portable shelter, but other than her family's large truck, there was not another car. She ran as fast as she could, screaming her husband's name as she sloshed and skidded back toward were her family sat. "Wake up! Wake up! GET OFF THE LAKE NOW!


Her husband stuck his head out the door and blinked with confusion. 8Two minuets later, their fish house loaded into the back of the truck without being disassembled totally, she watched her man, and one of her sons speeding off the lake, truck doors open , the water from their wheels welling up in their wake.


She grabbed up her fishing rods, and threw them on her sled and took a different course from her husbands to shore. **She kicked that sled as fast and as hard as she could, leaving her oldest son to run behind her.


The man and the boy were already at the boat landing, securing the items in the bed on the truck when she made it to shore, her oldest son at her heels. ***The ride home was quite, the adults shame thunderous.






*If you drive with your doors open you have a better chance of surfacing if you break through the ice.

** I had him chase me, because he is not good with the sled and if I would follow him like I wanted to do he would not go as fast and might run into black ice not knowing the danger

***Today we were the stupid people we make fun of on the ice every other year.