Many readers will recall the 2021 day when a Duluth, Minnesota, team came to the rescue of 26 anglers stranded on an ice floe that broke off in Lake Superior. Alex Messenger also remembers it as the day he found the subject for his first novel.

“The Ice on the Lake,” out March 10, is about Hugh, an elderly loner whose solo ice fishing trip turns disastrous when his chunk of ice breaks off and he’s forced to survive for days, unsure if anyone even knows he’s missing.

“I was on a rescue squad — I still am — and we got a page to rescue those 26 fishers who were stranded," recalled Messenger, whose nonfiction book, “The Twenty-Ninth Day,” detailed surviving a grizzly bear attack in 2005.

Messenger didn’t go out on that call. But, afterward, when rescuers talked about the final survivor, who walked toward Wisconsin on ice that he hoped was still connected to shore, Messenger began to think about the story’s possibilities.

“What would happen if no one knew this person was out there? It provided a lot of opportunity to explore what it would be like for that last person,” said Messenger, 38, who is married and has two small children. “I keep lots of notes of ideas, and that was one that stuck.”

Messenger scribbles notes on whatever paper is available, partly because it seems like less of a commitment than keeping a notebook called “Ideas for My Novel” and partly because it’s even easier to toss a rejected idea scrawled on a scrap of paper than it is to tear it out of a notebook.

But there’s evidence that the idea began to take shape immediately: The rescue occurred on Feb. 9 and, as Messenger rummaged through papers while chatting with a reporter, he came upon that first set of notes, scribbled on the back of a calendar page dated Feb. 8, meaning that he had ripped off the page one day before he used it as scratch paper.

In a way, those notes were a method of fooling himself into starting his second book.

“I was trying to figure out ways to make starting a writing project more attainable,” said Messenger. “A lot of times, for me, it’s about breaking it down into little pieces that I feel capable of approaching. It’s like a writing prompt. So, yeah, I tricked myself.”

Most of “The Ice on the Lake” takes place in Hugh’s head, as he ponders his life choices (widowed as a young man, he is estranged from his two adult children) and tries to stay alive. Having survived a grizzly attack during which he blacked out and was certain he was going to die, Messenger knows a thing or nine about being desperate to live.

“A lot of it was discovery as I went along. I think survival is fascinating, anyway, and certainly a subject I was wanting to explore without the burden of it being about me,” said Messenger. “I knew there would be experiences I could tap into, from my personal experience with the bear attack, but also what I’ve witnessed with the rescue squad.”

Messenger, whose day job is in communications at the University of Minnesota Duluth, drew plenty of inspiration from “helping people while they’re going through the worst day of their life” with the rescue squad. He also nodded to a classic work: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” — which, like “The Ice on the Lake,” is a spare book that largely takes place inside the head of an elderly man who is alone and in grave danger.

He re-read “The Old Man and the Sea” while working on his own novel.

“It reflects Hemingway in a number of ways. I wanted to recognize that, embrace it and have it in some ways be an homage to that book. I wanted it to be a different take on a similar situation,” said Messenger.

Like Hemingway, Messenger needed to achieve a balance, figuring out how his main character ended up so alone while also engaging readers in Hugh’s realization that he has more reasons to live than he realized. It wasn’t always fun for Messenger to send his brain into those dark places. There, again, his own story informed the novel.

“With that attack, there’s the granular decisions and practices, like always carrying bear spray and things like that. I try to bring those lessons forward every time I go into bear country,” said Messenger. “But on a more existential level, that experience of surviving a grizzly bear attack when I was 17 left me with this strong sense of purpose and of appreciation for the life I had after that attack. Because I was very certain I was about to die. I thought that was kind of the end of things for me. In a lot of ways, I got a second chance.”

You’ll have to read “The Ice on the Lake” to find out if Hugh gets a second chance. But Messenger can say that he was jazzed by the “freedom” of writing fiction, instead of nonfiction — and, especially, by the idea that a book doesn’t really end until a reader finishes it and decides what it means.

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The Ice on the Lake

By: Alex Messenger.

Publisher: Blackstone, 230 pages.

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