by Alex Messenger
When I was 17 years old, I was mauled by a grizzly bear. I was alone, in the prime of my life, had a small sense of invincibility, and the naivete that being a month into my 42 day whitewater canoe trip, things were about to get much easier.
I would soon be lying unconscious on the tundra, alone, sure I was about to die, and with an enormous predator surveying my still, bleeding body.
That’s all true. It’s painful, and horrifying on an elemental level, but I lived. That story would become my Wall-Street-Journal-bestselling memoir THE TWENTY-NINTH DAY (Blackstone, 2019). The honest trauma of that story – the pain, the terror, and putting it to paper – was a lot. So when it came time to write my second book, I decided I wanted to write about someone else nearly dying. And to make it less personal still, I wanted the freedom of exploring a story of my own making.
I’d take the physicality, brutality and intense focus that I put into my memoir, and ploy it in the world of fiction.
THE ICE ON THE LAKE was released on March 10 of this year, and it follows Hugh McLaren as he processes a terminal diagnosis and the accumulations of years of pushing people away after his wife’s tragic death when their young family was only just beginning. His world turned upside down once more, Hugh turns to his only solace, to go ice fishing on the frozen surface of Lake Superior, despite a wicked blizzard raging in the predawn winter of Duluth, Minnesota.
Hugh unknowingly kicks off a man vs nature survival narrative that’s both fiercely physical and psychological. Soon, he is trapped on an ever-shrinking ice floe on the largest lake in the world, and no one knows that he’s there. THE ICE ON THE LAKE is a cross between The Old Man and the Sea and Cast Away set in this subarctic sub-zero wintry world of northern Minnesota.
Creating this world with McLaren, and a narrative that was as thrilling as it was introspective, meant approaching it with a profoundly human lens. I wanted to unpack this story of a flawed man who was himself trying to make sense of his life and how he’d come to be alone. I wanted him to realize and achieve some of his hermetic goals, while recognizing the incredible error of his ways.
I first met the character Hugh on a real-life bone-chilling February day in 2021. Heading to work at a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, my St. Louis County Sheriff’s Rescue Squad pager went off for a water emergency on the big lake: 26 anglers were adrift on an ice floe that had separated from shore. While I wasn’t able to assist with the rescue, I found myself atop shoreline cliffs some hours later, looking across the steaming, shimmering expanse of Lake Superior ice and open water as our airboat checked for stragglers on its return to the launch.
Watching them, I spotted one angler who remained on the floe, a solitary figure. They picked him up, and he told our crew that he was walking to where he hoped the ice was still connected to land on the far shore.
I got to thinking, what would happen if no one knew that he was out there?
Walking back to my office, I saw Hugh in perfect clarity: alone in his home in the Duluth Hillside, waking up in his empty house, and his empty life, and the rattle of disease in his lungs. I saw him rising early in the storm, and venturing to the ice to ply the waters for great fish.
I put pen to paper that very day, and wrote the first words of what would become Chapter 2 in my debut novel, THE ICE ON THE LAKE.
Transitioning from memoir to fiction, I employed many of the same skills I’d developed to write my first book, but it meant that I had to mine my memories in a different way, and research new topics to fill in the gaps.
In many ways, I wanted this story to be a slow burn thrill. I wanted readers to feel the void of losing a partner, and the pit-of-the-stomach ache as Hugh discovered he was adrift. I wanted them to go along with him through denial, despite the contrary evidence in front of his eyes. I wanted readers to be mad at him for the choices he made on the ice and before, but to understand, at least at some level, why he did what he did. And I wanted them to feel the hard cold of an unrelenting winter, and to join Hugh as he loses touch with reality.
In many ways, writing THE ICE ON THE LAKE is a locked room mystery: We have the characters, and we have the setting, and we watch it play out in the stark emptiness.
That structure gave me a lot of freedom to unpack things, both figuratively in his recollections, and literally as he inventories his meager, but important, supplies to eke out an existence in a place thoroughly inhospitable to human life.
The framework in this story means we get to spend a lot of time with Hugh’s thoughts. We get to understand his strengths, and his shortcomings, and his motivations. We get to understand what’s at stake. And with Hugh, that’s his last opportunity to try to make amends for the accumulations of his regrets. The ticking clock of his mortality on shore made him aware of what he still had to do with what little time he had left – the sudden gravity of losing that opportunity pushed him to come to terms with his past, to push through to actualization and realization.
I’ll leave the specifics out, but suffice it to say: Hugh’s trip to the ice becomes much bigger than he’d originally anticipated.
It’ll end up providing him all he needs. And yet, it will cost him everything.
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