DAILY PROMPT
Fog
Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt.

Back in the 1960’s. My cousin and I did a lot of ice fishing. We had a homemade fish shack mounted on two wheels and an axle underneath the shack. We pulled it to whatever lake. We felt like fishing at. This one time we had the shack set up about a mile off the north shore. It was a very mild winter, no snow just clear ice. The temperatures had been warm most of the winter so there was open water out in the middle of the lake. About 2 miles from where we had our shack set up. Where we were fishing there was a couple feet of ice. The fish were biting pretty good, we fished most of the evening, it was probably getting close to midnight. We decide to go home with the fish that we had to clean.

When we came out of the fish shack. The fog was so thick you could not see the pickup parked a few feet away. What we should have done has stayed right in the fish shack because we had a heater inside to keep warm with. My cousin was determined that we would go home because he knew the direction to where we came on the lake at. I tried to tell him when we set the shack up the side with the window and door on was facing south, so we should drive the opposite direction. He kept trying to tell me we should start driving in the other direction.

He started out driving south and I knew we were going the wrong direction. If we continued going straight south we would end up driving into the open water before very long. I kept telling him, keep turning more to the left, more to the left. I knew we had to change our course more toward the left from where we were at, so we would end up on the east side of the lake. Not at the bottom!

We finally came to shore, it was along a deserted stretch of beach on the east side. There were no homes or cabins or any roads to get off the lake there. I told him, we will have to just follow the shoreline back to the north side, then go west until we come to our road to get back off the lake. All of this time, the fog was so thick you could not see anything, we proceeded to follow the shoreline around the edge of the lake and we finally came to the road where we had driven onto the ice at.

What a relief. I wasn’t that crazy about ice fishing, but ice fishing with open water on the lake was about all I needed to cure me of future fishing trips. If we had not kept turning more toward the left, we no doubt would have driven right out into the open water. We covered about four miles of clear ice in about an hour. That must do wonders for cleaning out the heart valves! Every time the ice creaked under the pickup, my butt bit another hole in that old seat cover!

That ice fishing was back in the days before GPS locators and all the fancy equipment that fishermen have nowadays. My internal compass was working, I was thankful for that. Fog will get a person completely disoriented, you have absolutely no idea what direction you are going. You may be able to tell what is up and what is it down, but South, East, North and West.

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