3 years ago, the pond in my village didn’t freeze over hard enough for ice fishing the whole winter. Let me put that into perspective. Families around here have ice fishing shacks they assemble and disassemble in the same spots every year. Several of my neighbors use the same spot on the pond for ice fishing that their great grandparents used. You can’t legally claim a spot on the pond, but God help you if you take granddaddy’s traditional fishing hole.
Anyhoo, 3 years ago when the pond never froze over hard enough to make ice fishing safe, people were shocked. That had never happened in living memory. Nobody’s oldest relatives could remember a winter when there had been no ice fishing.
Then the year after that and the year after that, the pond didn’t freeze over in January, although it eventually did. Families put their ice shacks out there, but for a much shorter period of time than in the past.
Looking at the extended forecast now, nobody’s going to be ice fishing this January either, even though not long ago it wasn’t unusual to see shacks set up before Christmas.
What’s weird about it all are the Fox News crackheads around here, meaning just about everybody, who insist this warming trend doesn’t mean anything. Global warming isn’t happening and I dare you to prove otherwise, is prevailing sentiment. If you mention the pond and lack of ice they just stare at you.
It’s like this article I just finished reading on Medium, like literally 2 minutes ago. Somebody was taking Joe Biden to task for daring to say that recent severe weather activity in the United States is connected to global warming.
I’m a stupid fucking redneck, this person essentially told the world. I take great pride in being ignorant. Fox News (yes, he cited Fox News) knows the real truth, that global warming is false and is not happening. How dare Joe Biden say otherwise?
I’m continually astonished by how willfully ignorant people like that Medium writer choose to be. But then I look at around at my neighbors who pretend that nothing about ice fishing has changed, and I despair. People just want to be stupid fucking rednecks. They take great pride in being stupid fucking rednecks.
That must say something about the human condition.
