Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger visits some fish house residents on Lake Mille Lacs and finds that there is much more to the experience of ice fishing than the fish.
Awarded:
1989 Northwest Broadcast News Association Award, award of merit in Feature - Large Market category
JAY KING: Four.
NEVA KING: Seven, six.
JAY KING: OK. Nine for four points. A run of three, and one point for the last card.
LEIF ENGER: For Jay and Neva King, ice fishing is a game of cribbage, a thermoses of coffee, and a long afternoon in their cabin-sized fish house on Lake Mille Lacs. The Kings are sitting on the lower of two large bunk beds. At Jay's feet is a 10-inch round hole leading straight down through the ice. There's a red-and-white bobber in the hole, but nobody's watching it. Neva and Jay use rattle reels.
JAY KING: When the fish pulls on it down the cork, it rattles. See. It lets you know that there's something down there.
LEIF ENGER: This is new-fashioned ice fishing. The comfortable kind. The King's house has a gas stove, aluminum sink, and a cupboard stocked with food. There's a porta-potty shuttered away in a corner, and a landscape oil painting hangs on the wall opposite the picture window. The Kings, who are retired, sometimes spend several days at a time here. No visitors. No phone calls. They like to eat walleyes, and Mill Lacs has them.
NEVA KING: If your [INAUDIBLE] was moving like that, you know it's a little bit excited about something down there.
LEIF ENGER: Neva has a nibble. The bobber dipping under the water just an inch or two. She says the fish aren't always so cautious.
NEVA KING: A couple of days ago, all of a sudden this thing just roared. It took that bobber way, way down. Time we got here, it was gone. I think it probably was a northern, the way it acted.
LEIF ENGER: But now the bobber is dead still. Whatever was down there will stay down for the time being. Maybe, not for long. In an average winter, Department of Natural Resources officials say, more than 50,000 walleyes will be reeled out of Mille Lacs. That's less than a quarter of the summer take, but still enough to draw crowds of anglers.
JOHN DREW: I think to some resorts, especially in Mille Lacs here, you're going to find their ice fishing is the big business up here, much more than summer fishing.
LEIF ENGER: John Drew is co-owner of the Rainbow Inn a small resort on the west side of Mille Lacs that rents out fish houses. He says people come here from all over the country, for the Walleyes, certainly, but also for the attendant cards, and schnapps and late-night storytelling. Winter on the lake is hectic.
JOHN DREW: You're up early in the morning, and you work late at night. Weekends are here. You're tired.
LEIF ENGER: At this time of year, Lake Mille Lacs has more habitable structures than most towns in this part of Minnesota, more than 3,000 fish houses grouped in villages of 10 to 100. Resorts like the Rainbow plow wide highways out to the villages. If there's no luck in one place, says Jim Zawistowski, you pull your house elsewhere, and drill a new hole.
JIM ZAWISTOWSKI: If I don't find fish in a couple of hours, I'll just move to another area. Wherever the fishing's hot, that's normally where I go sit up.
LEIF ENGER: Zawistowski and his wife Pam are up from the Twin Cities for the weekend. They've put up their black canvas portable fish house a mile or so north of the Kings. Jim says Lake Mille Lacs is an important place to him, a place to think, and sometimes pray. A prayer uttered on Mille Lacs, he says, is likely to get answered.
JIM ZAWISTOWSKI: Just before I was getting married, me and my wife were talking about for sure, was this right? And we talked and prayed if this is really right, if we should be marrying each other. And I went up to Mille Lacs, and I rented a house, and I brought my Bible up there. And I was sitting up there reading and praying, wondering if everything was right.
Then, my bobber went down. And I was fishing for walleyes, and I caught a 10-pounds northern through the ice. Not that that was a sign that said yes. But I was fishing for walleyes, and I'd never seen northerns in that area. And I said, well, tell you what, Lord, thanks for the fish. And I think I'll marry that girl. And that's the truth.
LEIF ENGER: Ice fisherman Jim Zawistowski. On Lake Mille Lacs, this is Leif Enger.
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