![]() ![]() The old-timer at the bait shop had handed her a rod-a scant three feet long, designed for ice fishing-off the wall the first time she’d gone in there. But now it’s here for only a short period of time. “Everybody used to snowmobile here,” Kirk Williams says. They had hoped to make the seasonal switch from hunting to snowmobiling, but it didn’t get cold enough. From left: Kirk Williams, Cole Williams, Lee Spitzke, and Mel Lyall hunt ducks near Amherstburg, Ontario. She’d crank her hand-powered auger, cut a channel through the thick ice, and open a portal to the quiet underwater world. When her family would drive from downstate Michigan to visit her grandparents, who owned the lakeside camp at the time, Leavitt would layer on warm clothes, collect a cooler of minnows from the bait shop, and walk out onto the ice as far as she could. A threat to idyllic winter ritualsįor Leavitt, 38, the ice has always been a place to bring her life into focus. A lake expert at the University of Minnesota’s Itasca Biological Station, she studies people’s cultural relationships with frozen lakes. “What’s happening in the Great Lakes region is a small part of a bigger story,” says Lesley Knoll. Do you remember when the weather used to be negative three degrees in January and December? I don’t know what’s going on. You’d have to wear big boots and big coats and scarves, and now in December it was just a small little breeze at 30 degrees. “Back in ‘94 we used to be up to our knees in snow. ![]() “The seasons are shifting,” Huffman says. Royal Huffman and Rebecca Porter take a walk in Cleveland, Ohio, near Lake Erie, on an unusually warm January day.
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