Chris Cash tells his story of falling through a spot of thin ice on Clear Lake.

I thought the sound of a frozen lake (minus a howling wind) was an eerily peaceful, icy silence.

Not a sudden, jarring explosion that seems to engulf you, followed by an instant plunge into the frigid water.

But January is the season for the chilling thunderclap of ice as it breaks beneath the weight of a vehicle.

"I'll never forget that sound in my life," said Branden Schare, who heard — or more appropriately, felt — the tremendous boom Jan. 17 on Clear Lake. He was in the passenger seat as his friend Chris Cash steered a Chevy crew cab about 150 yards from the south shore before the truck dropped through the ice.

"I've never really heard anything like it," Schare said, struggling for words. "It was just so loud."

And it wasn't preceded by a series of creaks from spider cracks as you might imagine based on your accumulated knowledge of cute cartoon characters clowning around on thin ice.

There's just a boom and a drop without a second to think.

Two days later, Jan. 19, the same sound echoed across Big Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa as brothers Nick and Joe Bjornstad drove the latter's Jeep Cherokee on a "gorgeous evening" to their favorite fishing hole to catch walleye.

The stiff west/northwest wind in hindsight could have been a warning sign. DNR officials explained that high winds churn the open water around the lake's aerators, causing wave action beneath the ice and surprise soft spots.

The thick ice that the brothers had driven on both Friday and Saturday was just a 2-inch eggshell Sunday where they were swallowed.

"The car went from horizontal to vertical instantly," said Joe, 31.

Joe's head hit the windshield, and then the passenger-side airbag inflated in his face.

"I put my arms out the window and caught the ice edge and the Jeep went down beside me."

Nick, 29, wasn't as lucky: He had raised his window to protect against the strong wind and sank some 20 feet with the SUV as he fought to shove his driver's door open but kept hitting ice.

"I don't know if I squeezed through the door or what exactly happened," he said.

Unsure precisely how he escaped the Jeep in his adrenaline panic, Nick scrambled to the surface.

Joe, seeing only red tail lights, the license plate and a bubble trail, had begun to pull off his boots to jump in and search for his brother when Nick suddenly hit the surface. "I just remember yelling 'help,' and it just so happened that my brother saved my life," Nick said.

Iowa DNR Officer Steve Reighard marveled that Nick found his way back to the 8-foot-diameter hole in the lake.

Nick, drenched and shivering, couldn't even move his hands to pull on the gloves that Joe offered him; his body already had robbed his extremities of blood flow to protect his vital organs.

Luckily, a Minnesotan on a four-wheeler spied the soaked brothers, picked them up and let them warm up in his truck. Then he drove them to yet another Bjornstad brother's (Jack's) house on the northwest side of the lake. They thawed out beside a blazing fire, still in shock.

The brothers' phones, GPS system, fishing gear and garb, ice hut and a winning $5 scratch lottery ticket remain with the Jeep at the bottom of the lake — not that the brothers care, considering they're alive.

I can hear the entire state of Minnesota scoff at an Iowan making a fuss over vehicles breaking through the ice. Just one more reason to consider us fair-weather wimps.

I'm guilty as charged. I've stood on large frozen lakes in central Minnesota as trucks have driven by. The deep bass-drum thud of ice as it shifts to accommodate the vehicle's weight was all I needed to hear to always hit the brakes at the shoreline.

But there I sat Friday with Bob Kirschbaum inside a 17,000-pound box truck parked on Clear Lake. "I read the ice real close," he insisted. He cuts sort of a Christopher Lloyd-type figure with his tufts of gray hair on the sides of his otherwise bald head and the occasional cigarette dangling from his lips as he operates a winch.

I didn't need to be sedated with Valium because Kirschbaum, 58, is Iowa's maestro of extracting vehicles from frozen water. These two jobs are his first of the season. Cash's truck probably is the 19th vehicle he has pulled out of Clear Lake alone.

Kirschbaum has been in the wrecking business for 40 years and with his highly trained Bob's Repair & Tow crew from Spirit Lake has carved out this watery niche for nearly 30. His sons Jason and Josh have begun to take over the family trade.

This weekend's Winter Games in Okoboji likely means a few jobs recovering sunken snowmobiles and four-wheelers.

The crew on Friday drilled test holes all the way out to the site of Cash's submerged Chevy crew cab and the ice house on wheels hitched to it. They marked their path with blaze orange spray-paint so that the wrecker truck (with "TOWER" license plates) and the flatbed laden with two giant pontoons and a patented scaffolding system (designed with help from a nautical engineer in Wisconsin) wouldn't stray onto weak ice.

Only the top of Cash's black truck cab and his tiny trout ornament atop the antenna poked above the 8 feet or so of ice and water.

Cash, 40, and Schare, 24, were lucky. Cash has fished on Clear Lake since he was 16, and his dad taught him well: "When you go out on the lake you take off your seat belt and you roll your windows down."

So the two friends were able to dart out their open windows and onto the ice without so much as getting wet. The ice house likely slowed the truck's descent and gave them precious seconds that the Bjornstads didn't have in their Big Spirit Lake swim.

But then I watched Dave Nelson on Kirschbaum's crew don a Navy SEALs-grade wetsuit, oxygen tank and weights and dive into the water around the truck and ice house. He attached cables so that the winches could lift them straight out of the water one at a time with minimal damage.

The crew used a special chain saw to cut away the ice around the vehicles — just one small piece of equipment among the thousands of dollars in gear, insurance and training that ensures the original mishap isn't compounded by another.

Kirschbaum said that jobs on this scale cost from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on time and complications.

Cash's black Silverado was back on the ice by 1:50 p.m. after several hours' work.

I stood there Friday on the frozen lake marveling at how much harder it is to get these vehicles out of the lake than it is to get them in.

When you hear the boom, it's too late.

Then it's Kirschbaum's turn to step in and shatter the eerie silence again with the sound of a chain saw cutting through ice.


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