The idea for this occasionally recurring column came from fishing buddy Chad Campbell, whom I’ve been camped out with the last few nights on Lake of the Woods at the Canada border. I haven’t written such a column regularly since about 2004, when I was still writing for The Elkhart Truth in northern Indiana.
Lake of the Woods is massive, 70 miles long and sits in Minnesota, as well as the Manitoba and Ontario provinces in Canada.
The ice is more than three feet thick at the moment.
It might look like uninviting tundra to some, but I see warm ice shacks with electricity, couch tour, and walleyes to be caught.
It’s an incredible natural resource.
We're in a heated fishing shack we rented from Dale’s on the Lake near the tip of a big peninsula that juts out into the massive lower basin of the lake. I would call these accommodations cozy and mostly warm (except for a few hours yesterday before we realized the heater’s pilot was out).
Don’t ask me what I was thinking when I decided to keep these plans after scheduling a three-week trip that ended only a few days before this trip was supposed to start.
I made the reservation for this fishing trip like two years ago, and as it turned out I hadn’t been ice fishing once this winter, which is very unlike me. I’ve been too busy to fish, apparently.
It has been nice to relax for a few days finally after what was an insanely busy visit to six countries, as well as catching six King Gizz shows on the most epic trip I’ve ever taken.
Most Minnesotans are done ice fishing for the year once the season for walleyes closes at the end of February, but the seasons stay open along the Canada border longer, and some of the best fishing of the year comes around now up here. We had a delicious lunch of fried walleyes this afternoon.
I realize that several of my friends, some of my most dearest, do not eat animals for personal reasons. And the band I just followed through Europe has a song that promotes not fishing.
While I don’t agree with some of the ideas in the song, I support the band’s right to represent that viewpoint and challenge people to think about what they believe and why. I empathize with my vegan friends, and do my best to understand their feelings, and am grateful our differences on this are not too much to overcome.
I also share concerns about overfishing.
I once shared a byline for a longer-form story on bluefin tuna, the concerns about overfishing and how quickly the fish can hit Tokyo’s fish market - within 48 hours of being caught off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The demand for sushi seems destined to be the undoing of a fish species that is a marvel of the world. A commercial fisherman once described a North Carolina state record bluefin that jumped completely out of the water as a Volkswagen Bug falling from the sky.
The fish weighed more than 800 pounds.
I loved telling that story, as I did for The News & Observer, and retelling it again here.
Fishing is something that would be hard to give up, but I’ve seen a lot of men give it up to old age. It was passed down to me by both of my grandfathers. They both died in the past year. I did get to take them out fishing one last time on Lake Michigan, maybe five years ago. I’m thankful for the memories, especially the fishing ones.
I am not ready to give up a food source I love for so many reasons, including the connection it gives me to the earth, its seas, mountains, forests, lakes and rivers. And the good times I’ve shared with friends and family there.
So, yeah this column: I’ve covered the outdoors for most of the past 22 years, including the last nine as the assistant editor for Outdoor News, Minnesota’s weekly conservation newspaper. While my focus with Jam in the Stream is largely live music, there’s obviously strong ties to art and the natural world here.
I’m certainly not done writing about the natural world, and I’m thankful I have the freedom to do a column like this one, for instance, touching on multiple topics.
I’ve formatted this column in the note style, so if you are bored by one topic, you can simply scroll down to the next bolded item.
Back in March of 2021, we had the luck to catch quite the display of aurora borealis on Gunflint Lake, along the Canada border. Photo by Chad Campbell
We left our DSLR cameras and tripods at home: That’s pretty rare for us for a March fishing trip to the border country.
That’s because this is also one of the best times of the year to catch the aurora borealis, aka northern lights.
Even though there was an excellent forecast for the lights Thursday, the weather forecast was showing lots of cloud cover, so neither of us felt like lugging the extra gear. We took a few looks out the north-facing window, and I thought I might have even seen a few flickers, but it was pretty cloudy. Chad thought it was just light pollution (there’s not much of it up here).
Meanwhile, a few hundred miles down the border near the northeastern tip of the state, that region’s professional nature photographers were taking some incredible pictures that showed up the next day on social media.
A couple of years ago we were over in that part of the state, basically the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (my favorite corner of the Minnesota and world) and we snapped some amazing shots on a clear night with purples and greens showing up in our images.
Unforgettable.
The Canada border is in the background on this shot looking north on Gunflint Lake, back in March of 2021. We were at a friend’s cabin and ice fishing for lake trout. Then the lights showed up.
I was reminded of it when I was on a fjord boat tour in Oslo, Norway, the morning after one of the Gizz shows. I met a fellow from Florida who was about to head out on an expedition in Norway to the North Pole, he said, in hopes of seeing the northern lights.
Sounded amazing, and yet it reminded me I live in place where I don’t have to fly off to Iceland, Norway or Alaska to see the mysterious aurora borealis.
By the way, the overwhelming beauty of the fjord tour out of Oslo reminded me of Duluth, Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters.
This view was a short boat ride out of Oslo, Norway, a weirdly awesome city with cool infrastructure.
About those streams: It’s fun to live in a state where I can basically move my living room out onto a frozen lake. We’re halfway between Minneapolis and Winnipeg. It is pretty much no man’s land.
There’s enough of a cell signal here that I was able to set up a hotspot and finish writing and post a story about my new friend Seamus “Streamus” O’Connor, a self-described “tour kid,” who has been live streaming, or attempting to, every single one of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s 17 shows in Europe this month via his smartphone.
He’s an amazing dude, and it was an honor to write about him and help him in his mission.
Yesterday afternoon, we got to stream the Gizz show in Lausanne, Switzerland, probably the best show of the tour to this point, though it was jammy (and I’m a sucker for the jam).
Billy Strings has been streaming his three-night run in Cincinnati for free at nugs.net. We streamed the show last night and intend to again tonight (check, Alex Hargreaves is tearing it up on fiddle as I edit/proof this).
I don’t care what anyone says. Billy is at the top of the jam world right now. At least he’s up there with Phish and King Gizz in the improvisational jam department.
About this column: So, Chad just asked me if I was still clacking away at this column. We both had a laugh about that. Me and brevity.
His original idea, “Ice House Revelations” was more of a stoner reference.
We never take a camping trip without Chad requesting some John Hartford, the late folk and bluegrass pioneer who was a banjo and fiddle master. I always am happy to put some Hartford on (and Billy Strings is always happy to cover some Hartford).
Consider my mind blown last night when Spotify bumped us down to the Hartford song, “John McLaughlin,” off Nobody Knows What You Do.
The album was released in 1976, the year I was born. I’ve never heard it before or that track.
The song is a reference to jazz fusion guitarist John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The song hits on the theme from “You Know, You Know,” from the 1971 LP The Inner Mounting Flame, an amazing, early jazz fusion album that is always worth a listen.
I wonder if they ever had the chance to jam together.
Hartford was on the frontier of where string music would head. McLaughlin may not be Miles Davis, but he’s always been viewed as an early pioneer of the jazz fusion era.
Only the lucky get to experience ice haus living. Photo by Chad Campbell