This is the worst time of my year.  In some areas, March is beautiful and there are adornments such as cherry blossoms to enjoy.   For those of us in the Red River Valley, it’s time to watch the dirty snowdrifts slowly recede, the rivers rise, and anxiously wait for the walleye opener (which was ridiculously close to ice-out last year and it’s in MAY!).

I just returned from a trip to Illinois via Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa (thus my absence from Blogville).  There were lucky folks fishing on the Mississippi river from boats, waving as we drove past, taunting me, as I’m sure they could tell clearly from afar that I was from North Dakota.  ”Poor bastards,” I imagined them saying as I left them and drove back north.  I thought of my own boat lying in state in my best friend’s quonset.  He probably won’t have the doors busted free from the ice and snowdrifts for another month so I can free my vessel.  And then about all I will be able to do is bring it home, park it in the driveway, and sit at the helm, making outboard motor noises and dreaming of open water.

At this very moment, I’m waiting for the melt to really break loose to test my newly installed 3/4 hp sump pump.  The Red River here near the headwaters is going to be above flood stage, as usual, and is due to crest on Wednesday.  Fargo prognosticators are predicting a crest there to match the 1997 flood.  Having lost a home to the 1997 flood when I lived in our sister city of Breckenridge, my back aches for pretty much the entire month of March, and I think about water non-stop.  Ironic that a fisherman would experience so much stress over the very same thing that provides so much enjoyment later in the season.

So I wait.  I can’t even do boat prep for the season yet.  The tackle has all been obsessively organized several times over the long winter, and the gear is ready to go back in the boat.  I guess I’ll stand in my garage and look around at all of my stuff, plug in the bait fridge, and wait for the river below the dam to break up so that I can at least drop a jig in it sometime in April.  And I will think of the guys below all the dams I passed on the way back up the Mississippi.  Catch one for your northern brethren, boys.  It will be a spiritual work of mercy for us souls in purgatory.

Whilst chewing the fat with my Mythology class today, I came to a realization. This god-forsaken edge of the prairie (that I really do love, really) doesn’t have any mythical creatures. Growing up near Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana, we had the aptly named Flathead Lake Monster. Hell, for that matter, we had Bigfoot and UFOs, too. And the woods seemed to attract all kinds of wierdos (like my seventh grade shop teacher) who almost qualified as mythical figures.

Fast forward twenty some years and I’m living near the point where North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota all come together. And there ain’t no mythical creatures. No Chupacabra (my favorite legend–and one that even stretches as far north as Huron, South Dakota according to my sources). No big hairy ape-like dudes. No dragon-like sea serpents in the water.

Just stories about getting drunk and falling out of the car on the highway. Farm accidents. Stories about “it’s so frickin’ cold that my [insert anything here] froze.”

I guess the giant mythical beasts don’t have anywhere to hide on the prairie tundra we have been blessed with. The biggest myths are the stories about the ones that got away, whether they are fish or girls or opportunities.

Signing off from the cultural lowlands, I bid you good day. Be happy if you have local scary monster stories to tell your children. I will steal another culture’s myth and let my kids go to sleep thinking about El Chupacabra tonight.

James Joyce (through a fictional character) described Hell to a group of schoolboys thusly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

fractal by Sundstrom at www.sxc.hu

“Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.”

I disagree on the temperature and circumstances of Hell.  I believe I have glimpsed it.

It is too cold for ice fishing and there is too much snow here. We have so much snow, in fact, that when holes are drilled, the pressure is so bad that water spews forth, slushifying everything and then freezing.  

photo by Xanderalex at www.sxc.hu

Forecast for tomorrow: 38 degrees below frickin’ zero (real temperature, not wind chill).  Record snowfall for the month of December and it’s still piling up.  

Somewhere a bad-ass Canadian ice fisherman is reading this and laughing while he screws together twelve foot extensions for his auger.  

I’m not.  Not when I have phrases like “afflict the bodies of the damned” and “how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings” unfurling themselves in my frozen brain.

Wake me up in May.