Ice fishing is not an action sport. A lot of people don't know this, but the cold makes the fish slow. It's not like catching a fish in the summer with a lake waving around you, rocking in a little boat. There's not much of a fight, just a weight, heavier than the sinker on your line. And when you pull the fish out, it flops once, maybe twice, its gills moving in and out. I always thought the fish seemed cold out in the air—which turns out to be true since the water is above 32 degrees and the air might be much colder.

Once or twice every winter, my brother and I would end up with grandpa in the family icehouse on Mille Lacs Lake. It had a bare wood floor at first, then utility carpeting that had been salvaged from a motel renovation, stained and cigarette burnt, brown and green.

Grandpa would come in, talking to us, in that false teasing voice of his—the one he used to prove he actually enjoyed his grandchildren—only I don't think he really did. We were hopelessly suburban kids, inept at being useful. If he wanted help firing bottle rockets, or making tennis ball cannons, we would have been ideal companions. But setting the steps didn't interest us. Television did.

There was a black and white set classically antennaed with the proverbial cot hanger. The reception was awful; Channel 11 came in best. It wasn't a real network station, but we didn't understand those distinctions back then and were relieved to catch reruns of our favorite shows and the occasional hockey game (so full of static that the only way to know the puck had changed sides was to catch the direction shift of the barely visible players on the ice).

The icehouse was always dark inside, even during the day. There were windows, but they were covered in plastic—a conservation measure—and too high for us to look out anyway. Sometimes we'd have a line in the water, sometimes not. We'd sit there unable to resist licking our chapped lips, huddled around the propane heater, retracting our fingers and thumbs from the extremities of our frozen mittens, waiting for grandpa to finish working on the roof or the threshold, so that we could go home.

People joke about the community of icehouses, the "Grumpy Old Men" scene. I remember bars, but grandpa seldom went inside them. I heard somebody say once that grandpa never paid for liquor (although he'd drink somebody else's). It's true there were stop signs and roads. But I don't remember camaraderie. Or community. Only freezing cold. And ice everywhere, like off-station noise, a dark murky gray.