Ice Shacks have been around a long time and are certainly not new to Manitoba lakes. The basic principle of an ice shack is to provide shelter from the wind and cold while you are ice fishing. In recent times, however, ice shacks have taken on a whole new purpose. The shacks have become the new social gathering place.
Ice fishing used to be a very serious business in that fishermen were expecting to eat what they caught. Many families in our community grew up on what their fathers shot or caught. Moose meat and pickerel was the mainstay of a regular diet. I imagine there was also a social aspect to getting together to “go fishing” but in the simple version of “you ate what you caught” there was not much room for social fishing.
Nowadays with the catch and release philosophy being prominent there is more reason to have your friends around so you can share the victory of the catch and the satisfaction of the release.
Another big social change might be that where once the warm, friendly and inviting pub was seen as the place to meet and have a few drinks with your friends the new meeting place is now the cold and frozen surface of the nearest lake. While there is still a law against drinking and driving a snowmobile or ATV there is less enforcement for such a minor infraction compared to drinking and driving on the “no tolerance” highways.
In the Ice Shack you can have a beer or two and still be able to jump on your sled and rush over to a friend’s house to pick up a ring of Kubasa without being worried about losing your license. There is just that much more freedom to relax and enjoy yourself with a group of friends.
The most relevant reason, moreover, for the Ice Shack becoming the new watering hole, or in this case the fishing hole, is what I see as a slight if not unconscious backlash against the bombardment of electronic communications we are smothered with. Between Skype, Facebook, and Twitter we know almost too much about all of our relatives and friends. We know when they are on line – we know what they like and don’t like – we know who they know. We know instantly, that is if we are online at that moment, when someone announces their engagement or pregnancy.
I heard the following conversation in my neighbor’s ice shack.
First Girl: “Did you hear Stella is expecting?”
Second Girl: “Yeah, I saw it on her Facebook last night.”
Third Girl: “Talking of Facebook did you all see the invitation to the (snowmobile) ride I put on my wall for New Years?”
First Girl: “Where should we meet?”
Third Girl: “I am not sure yet. I’ll just post it on my page when we decide.”
First Girl: “God, there is no point to us coming here if we all have to live on Facebook.”
Fourth Girl: “I only check my Facebook once in a while. Why don’t you just phone us?
Second Girl: “Have you got my phone number?”
My young and energetic neighbor, and his equally energetic girlfriend, appears to be the social center for a number of young singles and couples in our small town. Like all his friends he grew up here and is still working and living here and as a consequence have kept the high-school connection going.
Because of that homebound familiarity, despite the fact that they are all electronically connected, the Ice Shack crowd is inadvertantly leading the resistance. Facebook, like an embedded Moses, is leading us all toward an electronic wilderness and the ultimate isolation that comes with it. Socially, when interfacing with the computer screen we have lost our sense of touch and the feelings that come with it.
The Facebook generation has more friends than the proverbial girl that screwed the football team with about as much personal relationship as she would have with each team member as they tucked in their shirt tails to head out the locker room door. The sentiment is like finding out that your girlfriend is pregnant by reading her Facebook wall. The information is not personal. It is presented to you and everyone else with the social graces of a “gang bang.”
Ironically, however, being less electronically connected the Ice Shack doesn’t take you further into the wilderness but rather it can be a place to meet up with friends and family and actually find out or pass on gossip face-to-face. It brings people closer together.
The Ice Shack crowd still feels the need to get together, chat, regale tales of their last weekend’s adventure and share Old Dutch ripple chips, onion dip, kubasa, Ritz Crackers and cold beer. Oh, and catch a few fish while they are passing around the pretzels.
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