The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake

Winter Geography

Winter Geography 52 I am always a little sad the day after the deadline for removing fish houses from the lakes. In the Chisago Lakes area, we get accustomed to the geography of the temporary villages that bloom on the ice in December. We keep an eye on the activity of ice village life throughout the long weeks of winter. The demise of the ice villages signals the end of winter’s worst. It is a punctuation mark in the year, sharing kinship with the last day of school and Labor Day, two other endings with which the door clangs shut on a familiar daily routine and opens on to a new season. Pioneer Lake never has fish houses—who would go to all that work for bullheads?—but North and South Center Lakes are well populated each winter. The villages appear at roughly the same spots from year to year, but not always. This year, North Center had a sizeable colony far down the northwest end of the lake, something I don’t recall seeing before. The first village to emerge on any of the six Chisago Lakes springs up on the easternmost bay of South Center, where it connects to the larger part of the lake. That section of South Center must be shallow and sheltered from wind and wave action, because it freezes early, earlier than the other big lakes. People even appear on that bay before the rest of the lake has frozen over. I am frequently shocked to see a camper pickup—maybe the same camper pickup, driven by the same daredevil each year, I don’t know—on the ice at an impossibly early date when it seems it shouldn’t be safe. Once the South Center bay has been colonized, a predictable pattern of settlement ensues. First there are people with campstools, crouched over holes, unsheltered from the wind. Then come the trucks and cars that convey anglers to their unsheltered holes. And then, one weekend it is deemed safe, and the houses appear, five, ten, twenty all at once, and the lakes assume their winter geography of big villages, little villages, and isolated houses, and often roads running between them, and from each village to an access point on the shoreline. The appearance of the fish houses is the tangible expression of the full flowering of winter. The party is assembled, let the fun begin! The movie Grumpy Old Men introducedAmerican moviegoers to the concept of ice villages, something I had never thought needed discussing, but I was wrong. The Hollywood depiction of life on the ice apparently left an impression. I once took a raft trip down the roiling Snake River in Wyoming and spent much of the time answering questions from uninitiated Germans who’d seen the film and wondered about people in Minnesota who cut holes in the ice and dropped fishing lines into them. “Ach, ja, Minnesota,” they’d said when we’d been introduced. “Where people fish through ice . . . is that true?” But my favorite story of the improbability of an ice community is of a conversation that occurred at Hazelden, an internationally known drug rehabilitation center that actually overlooks the early-freezing bay of South Center Lake. A friend of mine, known for his wit and humor, was a counselor at Hazelden. He was acting as a mentor to an intern, newly arrived from Saudi Arabia, who found a Minnesota Winter Geography 53 autumn to be a good deal chillier than the desert. One November day, my friend caught the intern staring intently out the window at the lake. “Is that, is that ice forming along the edges?” the Arab asked in disbelieving tones. “Oh, yeah,” replied my friend, who was himself a transplant to the state. “Just wait ‘til the locals start driving their cars out on it and set up their houses!” A shocked silence followed. Then, laughter. “I get it!” the intern said gleefully. “They told me to watch out for you! They said you were a kidder!” This year, South Lindstrom had an unusually large village in a new location, just off the point from the swimming beach. By the third Sunday in Advent, there were twenty to thirty fish houses plopped down, and because it was close to Highway 8, I could watch village life each time I drove by. The weekends, of course, are the liveliest times for...