Ice-bridge and the bully

climate on mac And Island, the Dead Winner. It's one of the one of two places to restaurant slash taverns that's open year round and we should appreciate that The Mustang Lounge on Aster Street the Locals Bar. So today I want to talk about something I generally I generally refrain from discussing we're going to talk about the ice bridge, and it's not something I want to talk about it, and I'm going to tell you why I don't like talking about it. But we're to the point now where

something has to be set. There is so much misinformation being put out there, so much misinformation being spewed on social media, and now even the Detroit Free Press went there and put out an article on Friday that quite literally could have got people killed. And I said, it's time to do something. And the reason I try not to discuss it is because any information you give is

old information because the ice changes so fast. And let me back up just a little second, and I'm not going to get too involved here today, mostly because, as you may or may not know, I'm in the middle of writing a book actually about the ice bridge, and I don't want it to be an audio book on a podcast. So you know, some of you may know that in the winter, some winters, the ice between mack And Island and Senegmas freeze is enough to allow for passage.

And when I say freezes enough, sometimes it's just enough. The last two years, and if you want to count this year, the last three years, there hasn't been enough ice. The last two years, the boats ran all year, and this year there is some ice floating around, but the wind comes up and blows it away or some holes develop, and it just hasn't happened. And the reason we stay away from them. I run the Maclaland News and Views facebook page of ninety four thousand members. I think we

do it what we call an ice bridge blackout. We just don't discuss it. And the reason is we're not trying to be gatekeepers here or clean the ice for us. What people don't understand is there's nothing you can say about the condition of the ice bridge and expect it to be true an hour later. So how can we possibly say, oh, the guys are crossing this morning, and have uninformed folks jump on in their trucks, haul their somemobiles up and say, well, we read this morning they

were crossing, so we figured it fine. Because I'm going to tell you it's not like that. I'm gonna tell a few stories in this podcast to illustrate that as well. But what you have to know is that this three and a half to four miles where we cross, it is fluid, it is dynamic, and it is constantly moving. There is current there, tremendous current. The water is two

hundred feet deep, the straits are always moving. It is not like an inland lake where once you see the first shanny go up, you know it's good to be on. And a lot of people can't understand that. I also want to make it explicitly clear because here's where a lot of misinformation has been coming from. The ice bridge or crossing the ice is not sanctioned, it's not endorsed, and it's not authorized by any entity, particularly not the City of macn Island and or its fire department, not

this Antegna's fire department. Nobody is in charge of it. Nobody goes on record of saying, Okay, it's safe, it's good to go. That's not how it works. People. Just because you see people crossing it doesn't mean that, oh, it's safe. Oh. Some of the misinformation being spewed as oh the fire department checks it. No, why would the fire department go on record as of making the presumption

that it's safe when it's not. So there's that, And now, like I said, I'm i to tell you a few stories that hopefully it will shed some light and maybe, in fact, have you checked yourselves before you try to get yourself in trouble up here? Someday that you don't need to. And I don't mean trouble with the law, I mean trouble with you. Maybe make an arrangement to meet the Lord here. Here's a good one for it. One time we needed to get over and get some supplies.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon. It was myself and Chummy Chummy's wasn't his wife yet, the page and the squirrel and the four of us we headed over. It had hit ace hardware and grab some stuff. Nobody likes to go by themselves if they don't have to.

They certainly don't like to go after dark. But it was late February, maybe early March, as I recall, and the sun was getting higher in the sky and was in daylight a little bit later, and we picked up what we had to get from the hardware story He's hardware. And someone said, hey, let's run out to Timmy Lee's and grab quick beer before we go back. Yeah, sounds good. I have my car keys with me. My car's right over there. With piling the car, we'll head out to

Timmy Lee's, and we just came off the ice. We sat down, ordered a beer. I so much as put that beer up to my lips, and my phone rang and I looked, and then the caller ID was s my Horn. Smile knows the late s my Horn Smile knew so much about the ice, spend so much time off there, knows what to look for, and knows what he's looking at. He called me. I said hello, Smile, and he said, Jay, it's breaking up. That's all he had to say. I didn't say where. I didn't say

what do you mean. I didn't say, oh, come on now, A guy like Smile says she's breaking up. I said, we gotta go. Put put the beer down, never even finished it. Never he took a second drink, paid our tab, jumped in the car, went straight back, jumped on our snowbill, start heading back to mc and Island. The tree line that you follow now more on that. The second I noticed was no longer in a straight line. It was starting to make subtle zigzags. And nobody went out and

moved those trees. Folks. The ice is moving, It's moving in different directions. And that was a perilous moment while we're clipping along, we're not We're not stopping the gag lollies as they say, no lolly gagging. And we get to the beach. We look back. We can tell that the trees are moving a bit. Jump on oursomobiles. We head up Forest Drive. We stop at my house for a quick second to drop our stuff off. No biggie. We went over to Sunset Rock to take a look.

I'm gonna say for the minute that phone call to the time we got to Sunset Rock was probably less than an hour. And we got up to Sunset Rock. It's on the western side of the island. We looked out and there was several hundred yards of ice was gone. It wasn't even windy. It was a breeze, but nothing to write home about it. Just the current had made up its mind. It started to move and it took some of the ice with us. It was just gone.

Imagine that we stayed in in that tavern having a beer till after dark and then just headed across and we hadn't been giving the heads up. You often override your headlights on a snowmobill. You know what I mean. You're going faster than the headlights can see, and we very well likely could have ended up in the drink. That was the last crossing at the mac of the ice bridge that year. It was gone. I wouldn't say it blew out. It just broke up and moved out.

Is that a once in a lifetime story. Oh hell no. There's lots of them, and lots of the people here have those stories. Another good one I like to tell is and all these are going to be in the book, by the way, But a group of Stonemasons from Sinnaganas Windenburg Mason r Earin Windberg owns it now. They'd headed across headed back I don't know, two o'clock in the afternoon, a squall, really heavy like effects squall had come up, and they're just going to follow the trees and take

it easy to get back to Saint Agnas. These guys have a lot of experience. Windberg has been in business, I don't know, twenty five years, and before that he worked for his dad for thirty years. You know, he's crossed the ice thousand times, probably from Saint Agnes. Somehow Windberg and his group of guys lost the trail. It happens when it's white out. You can't see it happens. They lost the trail, they pressed on, they saw some trees come through the you know, they saw the shore

come through the snow. Oh, thank god, we made it. They thought they were up in the northern part of Saint Agnes called Evergreen Shores. And fact what they'd done is they, unbeknownst to them, made a huge U turn and it landed out by Devil's Kitchen, which is about two miles to the south where they left the island from. They were thankful, and I mean thankful to be alive. They didn't even go home that night. They went and got hotel rooms at the Pontiac and they stay ended

up spend on the weekend. A last close call. I'm going to tell you it wasn't a close call. It resulted in the death childhood friend of mine named Bobby Roach stopped in the village in about six thirty, had his dinner and told everybody who was going to head to Saint Agnes, no big deal. People were crossing back and forth routinely, and near as we can tell, he got caught in the squall and got off the trail, and he has not been recovered and that was a

real painful one to take. And unfortunately it's not the only time that's happened. Another one of my childhood friends was lost just a couple of years prior to that. He ended up going in the channel and was lost. And so when I tell you these things that that's not a safe place to be out there, it grinds my gears. When people say things like, oh, it's not my bucket list, Oh, I've always wanted to do it.

To me, that sounds so stupid. That sounds like someone saying, you know what, I've always wanted to walk down Woodward in Detroit from six mile to seven mile, or walk up it from six mile to seven mile, and someone from Detroit saying, are you crazy? It's it's not safe. And you say, well, I saw it on the internet. This person did it, and my buddies did it three years ago and they said it was fine. Blah blah blah.

You might be able to walk up Woodward one hundred times between six mile and seven mile or seven mile and eight mile nothing happened to you, and on a hundred and first time that might be lights out. But my question is that the residents of Detroit told you don't go there after dark? Would you tell then, well, I saw it on TikTok, I saw it on Facebook. You listen to him and say, maybe I shouldn't be out there playing, And unfortunately, due to social media, that's

not what we're getting. And the influx of tourists crossing the ice has just been mind boggling. When I grew up, it never happened. The ice is there just for the Islanders to get back and forth, get vital supplies, make doctor's appointments, and do so without cost. And now a lot of it was due to a film that was made, which I'll say the film was very nicely done, but it didn't emphasize nearly enough how dangerous that that thing is out there. And just yesterday a guy stopped me.

Hugh Rabbits has a lot of time, He's had a lot of close calls out there, and he said, you know, I want to thank you for what you said the other day about the ice. And he said, the only thing is you were wrong. You said it changes by the hour, It changes by the minute. And he's right. Conditions can change so fast out there, and yet all we're left dealing with is well, my friend said, all I read and so and so on. I'm telling you

it just doesn't work that way. And you know the misinformation being spewed about all well, the fire department checks it. And here's my favorite one. But the trees are up, it's safe. So let me tell you about the trees again. No authority puts those trees up. Those trees are used to mark the way for the guys who did the initial crossing to get over and back. That is not set up for everyone just to use as their guideline.

It doesn't mean anything. And what I mean by that is when the ice goes to heck, like for instance, had day Smike called me and said, there's you know, it's breaking up. Nobody went out there and took the trees down. And if a big hole opens up in the center, nobody goes out there and takes those trees down. So if you're driving up from Lavonia, Michigan, and you had your snowmobiles with you, and you get up coming up over the bridge, and by god, you see those

trees out there marking that trail. Trees are up, must be safe, right, Nobody told you that a big hole opened last night, because nobody goes out there to deal with those trees because it's too dangerous. We have our own codes. We do certain things with trees. Three across the trail means it's no good. And we talked to each other, but nobody, nobody promotes that. And speaking of which,

I'll tell you another story. Travis Bartanian was running the village in when the Grand Hotel had it, and a family would come in, a man and a woman and two children about eight and nine years old. And he said, oh, did you come across the ice to have dinner? And he said, yeah, we didn't follow any trees though, we just shot right over from Macina City. And Travis said what he said, Yeah, we came from Macina City. Nobody comes from Macino City. That's not where people cross the ice.

The reason why is the shipping channel is open, folks. The salt bound freighters and the coal freighters they still run in the winter. They don't go through the seux locks because those are clothes. But the runs from Detroit to Chicago and various ports, the salties as we call them, they're still running. And what had happened is those people didn't know any better. They just saw stuff on Facebook and they heard from their friends. They jumped in their stowbills.

They traveled here from Mackinaw City to the island, they had dinner, they were gonna leave after dark and head back. Thank god Travis engaged them, because what they didn't know is while they were eating, a freighter gone through and reopened up that channel. That whole family of floor would have gone in the drink, and that would have been the end of them. That would have been it. Nobody would have even have known where to look for him. And so folks ask, you know, why are you so

passionate about this and stuff is they don't understand. I have skin in this game. I'm the fire chief. I was a firefighter first for twenty seven years before it became the chief. I've got skim in this game because me and my lifelong buddies are the ones that have to go out there and enact life saving measures when you do something silly, or you do something stupid, or you listen to some social media post by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about telling you how you

can and how you go out there. And you know, one of my college buddies, I was talking to him the other day, and he's an attorney. He said, I would just tell people you're not going out there to save him anymore. And I said, you know, it's not like that. We don't have the luxury when a run comes in to say is this a tourist or is this a local? It doesn't work that way. We took an oath to protect and defend and do all we can.

And while I would like to say, if you're dumb enough to watch something on TikTok or social media or a vine or whatever the hell those are called, and put your family in jeopardy and jump on a snowbill and cross three and a half to four miles of ice that you haven't even checked, then yeah, I don't think I should have to go out there. But that's not the way it works. We do what we do, and we always do so, as you can tell, there's a little there's a little passion in my voice today

because this is getting out of control. On Friday, the Detroit Free Press ran an article that said the shipping lane has been closed, You're free to head across the ice. I couldn't believe it. I was reading it, and I couldn't believe it. Now is the shipping lane closed? Absolutely every year. Every year the Coastguard closes the shipping waters. And all that means is no freighters or cutters or anything like that, or fairies can go in the area

between Saint Agnes and Macken Island. That doesn't mean anything about the ice or its thickness. But someone saw that press release and they decided to write an article and anymore, I'm sorry, I'm digging on the press a little bit. They're aren't journalists anymore. There's people who I swear to God, they peruse Facebook and they write articles around it. They see something on Facebook and they write an article to

match without doing any fact checking. And so the article said, and I posted it on my page with a big SMH next to it, and that said, you know, the Coastguard has closed the water, so you can head out to mc and Island this weekend on foot, our snowmobile or something that extent. And I emailed the reporter immediately and I said, you need to take that down or

edit it because you're going to get somebody killed. And I told that reporter that there is currently a mile of open water separating mac And Island from Saint Agnas. There's ice in Stagnas, there's ice by down there's a mile of open water, and you're telling people they can just head out there. So this is the stuff I'm faced with, folks, And I'm passionate because I, for one, know how it feels to lose a friend out there in that ice, and it feels awful, and I don't

want anyone else to have to feel that. I don't want the families here to ever go through that. Again, I don't know any of the tourists that are coming here, but I don't want their families to go through that. So I've been there, and you may be asking, you know, why is this Why is this episode called the Ice

Bridge and the Bully? Well, when I try to correct these folks that are giving misinformation, they say that I'm bullying them, and you know, they want me to sit for an interview and tell them everything, and it's it's not like that. And so I'm hopeful you glean something from this podcast. You know, I'm not going to be all doom and gloom. Are there are there days when the ice is run all day without incident? Sure? Is there ever a day where I take it for granted,

absolutely not. And you know, to watch someone pull a you know, to be in said Agnus and see someone pull a SNOWEBI a lot of a trailer that they drove up here four hours and then put their children on the back of that snowbill then head across this ice. It sometimes covers up to two hundred feet of water,

two hundred feet deep of water. I just shake my head and then say, you were you were asking, you were doing the same thing if that was me taking my kids down to go down Woodward between seven mile and eight just because I could, because it's a bucket list I always wanted to do it. You know, there's

a lot of things that maybe bucket list. But you've got to know you're taking your life in your own hands, and more importantly to me and to my two daughters and my wife, you're going to be putting my life in jeopardy. And God knows I'm there to help. I truly am. But I don't think it's my position to risk my life because you did something dumb by not check facts or listen to something. By people who don't have any idea what they're talking to. Does this leave

a problem of well, how are we supposed to know? Yeah, it does. It does. The locals know. The locals tell each other what's going on out there. We don't go on broadcast ice conditions just because of the stories. I told you. Change is too fast and there's no way you know it's scared. The reason we did a blackout on my Facebook page about it is people tend to hit the share button weeks later, days later, sometimes a year later, will be reshared, and folks reading that tend

not to look at the date and the time. And so if we were to post a picture of people cruising across the ice, and you didn't bother to look at the date and realize that that was a month ago, or that was three weeks ago, or read all the comments saying, hey, you know that ice has moved since you're gonna get yourself in trouble. And you know, I know many of you listening may have extensive snowmobile experience, and you may have been ice fishing your whole life,

and I'm going to tell you it doesn't matter. The Big Lake is indiscriminate and doesn't care who you are or what you know. When it's ready, for that ice to break up. It can break up. You know. I've been out there foraging my way across with a needle bar, a spud, a big piece of steel, checking the ice to get across, and we often check the current. And you know, the way to do that is you push them snow into the hole you just chopped and you see how fast and which direction it goes under the ice.

It's not very scientific, but it works. And sometimes you push that snow in the hole and that snow underneath the ice, it just goes flying down the lake faster than you can walk. And we usually say, wow, it's boiling underneath us. There's been times when it's been flat, calm and the current is boiling. There's been times where it's been windier than hell and the current's not moving. It's you know, a lot of pressure is involved in

dictating the current. One time we were about a mile off the island and we checked the current and it was going about ten miles an hour to the west. Another mile from Saint Ignace, we checked it was going ten miles to the east and we all said, oh boy, that means it's a big swirling pot. The lake is swirling you know, in a clockwise rotation, and that's not good for a sheet of ice, let me tell you.

And so we know these things, and we know the perils, and you know, we look out for each other, but there's only so much we can do, I guess, to protect you from yourself other than you know, try to stay off and try to respect how dangerous it is. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things I wanted to cover. You know, I don't have a script. I just kind of shoot from the hip here, and I hope you understand where we're at with this romanticized version of one of the most dangerous things you can be

a part of. So maybe you can share this with a friend. And I'm sure I'll get some more hate mail. And I'm sure some especially some younger guys you know, and you're indestructible nineteen and twenty, they'll really probably roll their eyes and say, oh, that's no big deal. But you know, I want you to particularly pay attention to

that current remark I made. And here's why. You see a lot of videos of dogs and deer and sometimes people falling through a pond or falling through the ice, and you watch the Coastguard of the firemen go out and get them. The one thing they're not battling is tremendous current. An ice fisherman, a commercial ice fisherman. They're setting nets under the ice in Saint Ignas. I'm sorry

to bring this up. It might hurt some feelings. But he fell through and got caught in the current, and his friends watch him bounce underneath the ice down the lake. He didn't get a chance to come up through the own hole he made fallen through falling through, So you get what I'm saying. Where you fall through a pond and you see those people just standing there, or the dog is just kind of tread and water, you've got that and this tremendous current pulling at you if you

happen to fall through the big lake. And I don't know what your priorities are, but I think this is one you could probably maybe consider passing on. So once again, thank you Mustang Lounge for sponsoring this episode. I think it's an important one. And if you have hate mail for me, let it fly. Trust me, I've been in the fire service. This is my thirty sixty fifth there's thirty six year Your skin gets awful thick after all

that time. But I'm Jason saint An's with the mcaaland Moments podcast, coming to you from Mcalaland and everybody, be safe out there, and good day.