The Lake Where You Live

As I write this (on Jan. 11) we’re awaiting a Canadian cold front with temperatures bottoming out at around minus 15, and that’s not considering wind chill.

It reminds me that a lake in January looks like the definition of lifeless, an austere expanse of white, now and then whipped by wind that swirls the snow, the ice thickening progressively, so that by now typically more than a foot of it would imprison the water.

Still, the lake and surroundings are alive, vibrantly so. Markings in the snow deliver proof positive that life persists. As I visit the lake on an early morning I observe the varied prints. Taking a walk along the Birch Lake shoreline, I see the tracks of rabbits and squirrels, paw prints that as best I can tell belong to foxes, and the fleur-de-lis marks of a clutch of wild turkeys. 

I never see the creatures out on the ice in daytime; they leave their stitchery under cover of night or in the dim light of dusk and dawn. Much better proof of life exists under the ice, where the seasonal rhythms carry on, just as back in summer, though at a cold and sluggish pace. I always knew that but came to appreciate it fully a few years ago, when I took up ice fishing. 

At times I ponder what person, ancient or semi-modern, first conceived of fishing through ice. If we look at the flat white desert of a lake, the idea of fishing seems absurd. Yet the experience of ice angling shows just how abundantly life persists — shows it much more convincingly than scattered hoof and paw prints on an expanse of snow-covered ice. 

If I drill the first hole and deploy a jig around mid-afternoon, bluegills are likely to bite. A plumb bluegill takes in the tungsten jig and waxworm so delicately that the rod just barely twitches, and yet when hooked it pulls vigorously, swirling in tight circles beneath the hole as the reel raises it to the surface. 

The bright coloration — orange belly, vertical green-on-yellow stripes, hints of blue aft of the mouth — contrasts with the snow’s stark white. Crappies provide their own spectacle, black spots on silvery green, delicate upturned mouth, large and graceful fins they remind me of angel fish.

The fish don’t pull with the same gusto as in summer. Their muscle movements rely on complex biochemical reactions that proceed more slowly in cold.

Meanwhile I know that other creatures live below, notably frogs and turtles, making their way through winter in a kind of suspended animation, hunkered down in the bottom sediment, somehow pulling enough oxygen from the water to survive until spring removes the lid from the lake.

So cold-blooded life goes on, creatures moving more slowly, eating less, consuming less oxygen that in warm-water days. And except in fairly rare cases where a small, shallow lake runs out of oxygen during a long winter, they make it through. In a season that in so many ways bespeaks desolation, that can’t help but inspire.

Right now, the air temperature here at Birch Lake hovers in the teens, and this warm-blooded creature is glad to have a heated cabin and a bowl of soup to come home to after a walk.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.