Take a Kid Fishing

I had to stretch my steps to avoid the cracks between the greying planks. At each inch or so of space between the decking, my eyes would follow the white foam gathering at the tops of waves that ran beneath us to the beach. When my grandfather, Poppy, found a spot along the pier railing, usually just behind the breakers, I continued on while he got everything set up. My circuit to the end of the pier and back was an intelligence gathering mission. I stopped at every sea-water-filled bucket and ice-packed cooler to examine the contents: usually croaker, whiting, or red drum awaiting an evening fish fry, and I asked the leather-tanned fishermen, between long pulls on their beers or long drags on their cigarettes, what bait they were using.

The top of the railing was bloody when I got back to Poppy and two lines were already in the water. The blood was from the bait, aptly called bloodworms. After a bit of pocketknife surgery, one of the foot-long parasites easily filled the four hooks of my grandfather’s two rigs. I reported what I had seen on my recon mission, and my grandfather chewed over the information, working it in his mind like he worked the plug of Redman in his cheek, trying to determine whether or not we should add some cut shrimp to our arsenal of parasites. Most fishermen preferred shrimp, not necessarily because they are more productive at the end of the line, but because bloodworms are poisonous and can deliver a pretty nasty bite, much like a bee sting.

Poppy was all business. Most of the fishermen leaned their rods on the railing and reclined, soaking in the sun or stealing a glimpse at the stream of bikinis coming and going on the pier. My grandfather remained taut and attentive, and so did his line, a length of which he always kept pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Poised to set the hook, he felt every nibble and, consequently, we filled our bucket while our pier mates mostly fed the fish. I held the second rod and tried to emulate him, hoping not to show my youthful impatience by jerking the rod back when all that had disturbed the line was the swell of a wave. When I got something on the line he helped me reel it in, but I always hoped he would get hooked up first so that I might get to pull one in all by myself while he was busy landing his own.

I was six or seven years old and clad in an orange T-shirt with a Bugs Bunny decal ironed on. For luck, I wore it every time we went fishing. I can remember an old Polaroid. I’m grinning, holding up a string of bream from our freshwater pursuits that reaches from head to toe. Bugs is taking a chunk out of a carrot. I just about lost a chunk of my face that day on the pier. Despite good fishing, I had grown antsy like all little kids do, so I set out down the planks to chart the progress of our pier mates. I looked up from a spot-tail swishing water in a bucket in time to see Poppy pulling in another one. By the time I returned, plastic flip flops snapping at my heels at every quickened step, my efficient grandfather had already bucketed the catch, rebaited the hook and, unaware of my position behind him, hoisted the rod over his shoulder. I was too close. I got a mouth full of bloodworm, a hook snagging in my lower lip as my grandfather turned the lead weight around at the onset of his cast. The sensation of extra weight on the line signaled for him to stop. It’s better to rip off a Band-Aid than work it off slowly, and I think I might’ve preferred that he had continued with the cast no matter how much of my lower lip went to sea. Instead I tried to stay still while he worked the barb loose with red-stained fingers, the bait’s blood mixing with my own.

I cried through the lecture until he suggested that maybe it was time to go.

“No, one more fish, Poppy. I promise not to get near the hooks.”

* * *

Now when I walk down that pier I have to shorten my stride, making choppy steps to stay on the planks while Silas stretches his legs to keep pace, his Crocs settling safely between the cracks, at least until he catches a glimpse of the first bucket. Then, pier rules and mother’s backs be damned, the boy takes off, running over the cracks until he finds a bucket brimming with a bountiful catch. Cutting tight circles in their holding tank--their final resting place--the fish arrest Silas’s normally scattered attention. He wants to touch them, but thankfully always politely asks the angler for permission first. Squatting, he strokes their silver sides. Eating the fish never occurs to the boy; to him they are part pet and part playmate. And he must have some of his own.

Before the discovery of fish our beach time was spent erecting sand structures that never got very tall before boy Godzilla un-erected them with a stomp (or ten). We played with trucks. We gathered shells. We rolled around in the sand fighting over a little Nerf football. We threw sand; okay, he threw sand, usually at me, but sometimes karmic wind gave him a taste of his own sandy medicine. When we got hot we waged war with waves in the shallow water until we cooled off. We played a game called chase Silas to the horizon and carry him back, kicking and screaming. This fun game featured the boy marching down the beach to each little tourist settlement--an umbrella, coolers, beach bags, and beach chairs or towels positioned based on their occupant’s taste for the sun--to beg food or toys off total strangers. Admittedly, I didn’t mind this game so much when he employed his considerable cuteness to get an audience with attractive ladies. But for every beach beauty there were two or three Earls, peering down at us over their beer guts, wondering why this long-haired toddler was rifling through their stuff.

Fish put an end to his wandering. We started small. Really small. I found an old butterfly net under the beach house and learned to catch mud minnows, who were tossed so far up the beach by incoming waves that sometimes they had to swim back on their sides, riding the tide as they sought the safety of deeper surf. Even in such shallow water they weren’t easy pickings, and for every 50 stabs with the net I might collect one darting fish. That one shiny minnow, no bigger than my thumb nail, would buy time until I caught the next one. I soon learned to double my odds, stalking the shoreline until I found a school of minnows and waiting for the push of an incoming wave to force an unsuspecting fish into the waiting net. If I found the net empty, I would pivot in the divot the wave dug out beneath my feet and try to pick one off on the second leg of its round trip.

Sometimes we dug a deep hole near the water and waited for a wave to fill it. Silas sat in his sandy aquarium, harassing our catch as they circled their confines, plotting an escape that wouldn’t come until a strong wave caved the walls of the watery fortress. The boy developed his own minnow transport system, plunging his Tonka dump trunk into the shallows, letting water rush into the bed before following me down the shore. The net went in. A fish came out. He held it for a moment, admiring the bright shine the sun extracted, released it into the truck bed, then beep beeped the truck backwards to his makeshift aquarium. He dumped the entire contents into his pool and the cycle began anew: fill truck, find dad, wait for fish.

“It’s time for lunch.” “It’s time for more sunscreen.” “It’s time for dinner.” “It’s time for bed...” Anything I said or did that threatened to break the cycle was met with the same response: “One more fish, Dadda.”

Eventually we moved on to bigger and better fishing technology, a casting net that allowed me to ensnare finger mullet. Now I was bringing in several fish at a time and the boy’s aquarium looked like a display at the live bait shop, except there was a boy in the middle of the tank with a butterfly net scooping out the bait. He would trace a fingernail, softened by the surf, over the silver scales and pet the fish with pruny fingers until I coaxed him, finally, to return it to the water before it wasn’t live bait anymore.

***

Our strip of sand cut a path between the blue-green ocean and the brown, muddy waters of a crab and oyster-laden inlet. The sun was just starting to color low-hanging clouds over the inlet, its westward sinking signaling the dinner bell, when a father and two sons rose, backlight at the top of the dunes, poles in hand. Down they came, stepping quickly despite the encumberance of gear, racing the sun for supper. At the shoreline they shoveled sand away from the water and picked off unearthed mole crabs (or sand fleas, depending on how southern you are) on their dash back to the sea. The little armored crabs found new homes on hooks and, with the help of four-ounce lead weights, took a flight beyond the breakers. It didn’t take long for a rod to bend.

When Silas picked up on the excitement I knew it was going to be a late dinner for us. By the time the catch was flopping on the beach, he had splashed out of the mullet farm and rushed to the scene. Seized by a convulsion of pure glee, he stretched his arms straight down at his sides, fists balled, thin muscles taut, and bounced up and down, gradually rotating to face me as I caught up.

“It’s a shark, Dadda!” he squealed. “It’s a shark!”

The fishing family’s patriarch removed the offending species from the hook quickly and gave it a disgruntled heave back to whence it came. A foot-long sand shark is nobody’s idea of dinner. But that’s all they got--little sharks--one right after another, while Silas looked on with an unyielding sense of awe. Down the beach I dug a trench and herded the boy’s now forgotten pet mullet collection back to sea as the blue of the horizon faded to deeper and deeper shades. Soon there would be no horizon. The fishing family disappeared over the dunes at dark, and I finally got a hold of my prize catch, who asked, “Can you catch me a shark, Dadda? Please?” as we headed for the break in the sea oats that led to dinner and a long overdue rest. “Tomorrow,” I said.

It was a short night. As soon as dawn crept in through the blinds the boy wrestled free from our cuddle and jerked the covers off the bed, which is his not so subtle way of motivating me to get moving. I buried my face in a pillow, determined to return to slumber, but it was unburied by the whiplash from each boy bounce. Jumping up and down on the bed, he repeated two words: “You promised,” until I pulled on some clothes and we were off to the bait and tackle. I had dreamed of this milestone day--no minnows, no mullet, but a proper day fishing--since his conception, but after waiting years for the moment I could’ve happily pushed it back until the afternoon, or at least until eight a.m.

The bait shop was like our mullet farm on steroids. Bubbling tanks contained all manner of tempting treats for trophy fish, including our friends the finger mullet and mud minnow, as well as other small fish, fiddler crabs, and live shrimp. Silas stared while I shopped. I picked up an eight-foot pole for surf casting, a couple of rigs with specially shaped weights for keeping the bait anchored despite the steady onslaught of the surf, a bait knife and bait bucket, pliers (just in case something scary came back on a hook) and, with apologies to my grandfather, frozen shrimp rather than bloodworms.

Back at the beach house, I forced a bowl of cereal down Mr. Excited’s gullet and chased him around the porch until he was thoroughly lathered in zinc oxide, then I pack muled our haul from the bait and tackle shop to the beach. I worked a shrimp free from the frozen chunk, released some orange goo when I pinched its head off, shelled it, and cut it in two equal parts, one for each hook. I waded out and listened to the satisfying sound of monofilament leaving the spool after I launched the line over the breakers. I kept the reel open as I made my way to the shore so I didn’t pull the bait in with me. When I hit dry sand I snapped the reel closed and cranked it tight. I eyed the section of PVC pipe I had brought down as a rod holder, but then I thought of Poppy on the pier, forever watching the ocean, line pinched to feel every nibble. I would only use the PVC for baiting hooks. A rod belongs in your hands, so I rested the butt of it on my hip, took a length of line and felt it cut into my finger. I watched and waited, trying to resist the urge to jerk the rod tip back every time a wave pulled the line a little further into my flesh.

It wasn’t long before I felt the unmistakable back and forth signal of a bite and set the hook hard, pausing for a second to feel the satisfying vibrations of the darting prisoner before turning the crank. Fish on! Silas abandoned the dump truck and pastel plastic beach buckets and appeared at my side, sharing my excitement over solving the mystery at the end of the line. The mystery was partly solved before I cranked the fish to shore. It rose, clearing the water with a leap, tail surfing the green sea in a desperate attempt to spit the hook. Glimmering silver scales, and the fact that it jumped at all, meant that what we had was definitely not a shark. It turned out to be something more dangerous, a juvenile blue fish that maybe went a pound. After I worked the hook free I showed Silas the blue’s impressive rows of razor-sharp teeth, and we both agreed that it would be better for him not to handle this aggressive predator. I met a weathered fisherman once with a stub of a thumb: the culprit, a big blue. Big or small, they make for great sport fish but not very good eating, so I waded out to my knees and set our first specimen free.

Blue fish “run,” meaning that they migrate in a large school that seems to morph into a veracious pack of feeders all at once. Find one and there are likely many more where it came from, so I worked quickly to rebait and return the rig to about the same spot. Silas was in my pocket as soon as I returned to dry land. He also anticipated a quick hook up. A minute is an eternity in the life of a child, and after 15 minutes of all quiet at the end of my rod I had resigned myself to the prospect that the run was over. And the boy had trailed off, back to his toys. I hoped that he was really ready for this, that he could stave off his demands for attention long enough to let me hook him what he really wanted. I felt a desperate pressure to catch something, so I started jerking the rod tip back and pulling in baited hooks at every tug from a wave. Or I’d reel in the rig to find that I had given a crab or pinfish a free meal. Silas reappeared every time I started turning the crank, and, head down, turned back to his toys when the rig bounced up empty.

I tried to channel my grandfather, the man who used a .22 to pick off squirrels and rabbits that dared infiltrate his garden, and ate them. The man who came home with a deer strapped to the hood of his Buick after a successful hunting trip. The man whose quiet patience always yielded a stringer of fish. I resolved to quit freaking out over every tug of the sea. I’d plant myself, gentle, foamy waves lapping at my ankles, line in hand, until I felt the sure tug of a fish. And, finally, I did. This is no fish story; the rod did not double over and I never had any energy sucking battles. But, as the sun moved behind me and scoured my neck a bright red, the bites came. Maybe the smell of the bait had finally gotten around. One little shark, two little sharks, three little sharks...we never waited more than five minutes before I was taking back line.

The little scavengers were exhausted by the tug of war and fell limp in my hand as I worked out the hook. They had jaws full of teeth, but they were too small to do any damage. I even ran my finger over the teeth and let one gnaw on me a bit to make sure it was safe for Silas to handle. He took them with outstretched hands and no fear, though curious beachcombers were a bit more weary when he ran up to them and shoved the captives into their personal space. To save the sharks, and the old ladies with their grocery bags full of shells from heart attacks, I urged him to take them back to water so they could grow up. “We’ll catch them again some day when they’re bigger,” I promised.

We did catch one decent-sized shark, a scalloped hammerhead of about three feet with a nasty disposition. Silas chose to let me put this one back. When I turned him loose in waist-high water he turned to face me rather than dart back to sea, circling menacingly a few times before I plowed through the water to the safety of shore. I walked down the beach a bit before wading in for the next cast.

By the time darkness arrived to put an end to our day we had landed 18 sharks along with an assorted oddity of sea dwellers, including a sea robin, puffer fish and, believe it or not, a starfish who had sucked a bit of shrimp into its hole. The starfish rode the line all the way in despite not having been pierced by the hook. We managed to snare a few careless bait-stealing pinfish and some red drum, both good eats, but I wasn’t confident that we would get enough to make a meal so I threw them back. And, unlike my grandfather, I didin’t have a wife waiting to tackle the always pleasant job of cleaning them.

After we reached double digit sharks I told the boy we were done for the day. “It’s getting late; it’s time for dinner. Maybe if we hurry we can play with trains before it gets too late.” But he wasn’t satisfied, so I kept pulling them in until it was too dark to be fumbling with hooks.

“One more shark, Dadda,” was his new refrain.

We were back at the bait shop first thing in the morning for more shrimp.

Adjunk

I was hunched over in the backyard, left hand gripping my knee and right hand, index and middle fingers extended, pushing as deep into my throat as possible. I had tried to disappear quietly, easing the sliding glass doors open and finding a site in the yard where none of the house windows would reveal my position to our dinner guests. I hope it comes loose quickly so I am not missed. I hope they don't notice my flushed face when I return, the beads of sweat on my forehead.

I don't have an eating disorder, but I might as well. Eat. Choke. Force myself to gag. Repeat. Seized in my throat by unpredictable spasms, solid food refuses to go down; it has to come back the way it came in. Steak and chicken have been removed from the menu. Even a well-masticated Triscuit feels like swallowing a chainsaw.

When the fear of getting something hung made it impossible for me to enjoy entertaining guests or eating out for fear that I would have to excuse myself to get the suspended morsel unhung, I phoned my family doctor. After filling my mind with visions of cancerous cells clogging my esophagus, he sent me to a GI. The GI, who I met about two seconds before succumbing to anaesthesia, determined from my symptoms that an esophagogastroduodenoscopy was in order. Not surprisingly, they call the procedure an EGD for short. They put you out for the EGD, which involves snaking a tiny camera down your throat, stomach and the upper reaches of your intestines. I would not want to be awake for that. The last thing I remember was the lens of the camera swimming for the pried open cave of my mouth like a lone fish eye.

Before the procedure a nurse showed me to my gown and then threw the curtain closed on her way out to give me some privacy. I undressed, clumsily fiddled with the ties until I was more or less covered, and waited for the nurse to return to rub up a vein for the IV. She didn't come back for awhile, so I went in search of something to read, finding the latest copy of the local home showcase magazine beckoning from a rack on the wall.

The chancellor's house from the area university was featured. I've got two degrees from that university and I've been teaching there part time for five years, but this was my first glimpse inside the behemoth mansion, a 9,000 square foot structure with two kitchens; the whole thing cost two million dollars to build. The dining room seats 66, but apparently there's no room for adjunct instructors at the fund raising dinners. And that makes sense. How much could a person making $15,000 a year afford to give?

I flipped the page. The main kitchen has more sinks in it than my entire house. Glimmering stainless steel appliances, adorned with the prestigious Viking label, broke the expanse of granite countertops. I am sure the appliances alone cost generous alumni donors more than my salary sets back the taxpayers. The fridge was bigger than a dorm room. The island seemed more like a continent.

Owing to economic recession, the chancellor's university had a hiring freeze for the 2009-10 academic year. The following year the budget was sliced by six percent, and the university passed the buck to students through a $500 tuition hike. My salary, which is less than half of what's considered a "living wage" for where I live, has remained stagnant for the last two years, and is up only a few hundred dollars from what it was when I started. Perhaps, given the current economic climate, the opulent spread of the chancellor's mansion was poorly timed and in poor taste. Like a lot of things lately, I had trouble swallowing it.

Down the hill from the chancellor's house, working quarters aren't quite so luxurious. I am housed in my department's adjunct office. The office was once a classroom, but due to its position above the aging hall's boiler room, it was deemed unfit for teaching purposes. In winter, when the archaic heating system strains to heat the building, the room constantly shakes like a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. In the room's next life it housed the graduate assistants, but their vociferous complaints led to their exodus into a cushy room across the hall that has--shudder--window air conditioning units. My office space enjoys no such amenities, yet, despite the shakes in winter and the oppressive heat in August and September, there is always a crowd. It's not really my office at all, but rather a communal earthquake grounds shared by 14 of my coworkers. The 14 of us inhabit 14 desks, strewn about the crowded space, taking on various shapes and sizes, no two alike. We share four computers, hand-me-downs from the grad students across the hall. There are two printers. One that doesn't work and one that sometimes works.

The adjunct office is not exactly a welcoming environment for student consultations, as you're constantly reassuring them that the trembling structure isn't going to collapse on top of them. "I promise you're not nervous," I joke. "It's just the room that's shaking." But, as I leaf through the home magazine and see the chancellor's master bathroom, with its separate room for the toilet, so spacious that I could park my beat up truck in it, and its dressing room that dwarfs my son's bedroom, it became more apparent than ever that the conditions--both physical and financial--that I work in are no laughing matter.

Half of my department is staffed by non-tenure track faculty, most of whom are part-time employees despite their wish for full-time work, and none of whom have had the right to vote in committee and department meetings. It's the apartheid of higher education, and, not surprisingly, the caste system creates a lot of animosity between the haves and have nots. We want a living wage, we want health benefits, and we want the right to vote on department matters. The tenured faculty fight to stifle our upward mobility, clinging to the power bestowed upon them by their PhDs like politicians trailing in the polls.

And their numbers are down. According to the New York Times, only 27 percent of college classes are taught by tenured professors, down from 75 percent 50 years ago. When a tenured professor retires, universities, ever conscious of their bottom lines, can replace the outgoing professor with three part-time instructors, give the part-timers the maximum number of classes that they can teach without qualifying for benefits, and save a boatload of money. We're quick to admonish Walmart for such behavior, but the public universities entrusted in developing the workforce that will be the lifeblood of our country's future get a free pass.

By every measure--student evaluations, peer reviews, and the end of year reports from my supervisors--I am an excellent teacher, as are the majority of non-tenure track and part-time instructors I've huddled under the door frame with in the earthquake room. A PhD and the comfort of tenure does not necessarily make for a better teacher, especially for those professors who view teaching as an annoyance that gets in the way of their research responsibilities. Most adjuncts are highly motivated teachers, and we can focus all of our efforts on teaching, as most of us are not expected to contribute research as part of our jobs. We work semester to semester with no job security. We're certainly not in it for the money, so it follows that we not only have a passion for shepherding our students to the essential knowledge they need in their academic and professional careers, but also that we must perform our jobs well in order to keep those eleventh-hour emails offering us one more class, one more paycheck, from disappearing from our inboxes.

But, even though most part-time instructors do their jobs well, the system hurts students. Because they are so poorly compensated, adjuncts do not have one job. Many, like me, pick up a class or two at the closest community college (in fact the local community college has syphoned many of its full-time faculty from the pool of adjuncts at my university). We teach for online schools like the University of Phoenix. No matter how competent and motivated the instructor is, she or he cannot possibly serve the individual needs of their students as well while teaching seven classes as they can while teaching three. And the overload of caffeinated late-night grading and planning sessions can lead to burnout for even the most dedicated teacher. Whether it's due to burnout, frustration with the lack of a voice within their institutions, or being forced to find another career path for financial reasons, adjuncts are a transient lot, and the heavy reliance on them creates instability in the foundation of our higher education system. If the bottom line was providing the best education--to truly best serve the public that supports them--then public universities would take care of their best teachers. But the bottom line is not providing the best education. The bottom line is the bottom line, so adjuncts will go on being exploited, reheating the leftover beans and rice while, up the hill, a chef prepares gourmet fare for the chancellor's well-heeled guests.

But I couldn't swallow that steak dinner anyway. To the bemusement of the nurse, I babbled nonsensical dream words as she welcomed me, begrudgingly, back from the twilight sleep. At first she, too, seemed to be speaking in a foreign, syrupy tongue, but I finally made out the message: "You're waking up. The doctor will be in to see you soon." As the cloud of anaesthesia burned away, I thought about my son. I didn't have any health insurance before he was born, but the responsibility of taking care of him brought with it the responsibility of taking better care of myself. So I shell out $400 a month out of pocket, and if not for that I wouldn't be here with my ass hanging out the back of my gown. An EGD can cost as much as $2,000 without insurance, and that's not in the adjunct's budget. Today my bill will be $30. And, thankfully, that $30 bought some piece of mind. The doctor's camera didn't find anything out of the ordinary in my esophagus. No cancer. He explained to me that stress and acid reflux are likely the culprit for my esophageal spasms. The throat uses contractions to move food to the stomach, but the spasms make these contractions irregular, uncoordinated and overly powerful. Instead of being moved to its next stop on the GI train, the food gets stuck.

I was ready to get unstuck. There's a note on the door of my department chair's chambers explaining that he is in, but the door is closed to keep the cool air from escaping. He has an air conditioning unit too. The cold front that greeted me when I entered was refreshing. I had spent the last hour sorting through the last five years of my life, dumping most of the desk clutter into a recycling bin I had dragged from the hallway to my sweltering communal office. The chair's secretary announced my presence and I strained a "Hello" over the droning of the AC. I felt out of place in my plaid shorts and polo shirt, products of the clearance rack at Old Navy, when the chair rose to greet me, resplendent in a dark, tailored suit.

"Is this easy or complicated?" he asked. I had no appointment and he was expecting someone.

"It's complicated, but it won't take long, " I promised.

I told him that I would not be returning for another semester without a raise and benefits. He mumbled something about budget restraints, wanting to help me, but not being able to wave a magic wand.

I spent nine years as a student at that university, getting a degree in journalism, a license to teach high school English, and finally an MA in English Education. I spent five years teaching there. But I walked out the door without mixed emotions, without even a tinge of melancholy. No regrets. I don't need this stress.

Maybe Walmart is hiring.

"This Is My Rifle; This Is My Gun. This Is for Fighting; This Is for Fun."

After years of steady "No's," I finally caved to the boy's constant pressuring for his first toy gun. It's not a Red Rider BB gun with a compass in the stock, so at least he won't shoot his eye out. His new piece, an overpriced, malfunctioning, cap smoking pistol from Tweetsie, is dubbed the "Doc Holiday." I keep trying to get him to say, "I'm your huckleberry," but he has other ideas for this extension of his manhood. The boy strapped the holster on, shoved his piece in it, and slung it around to rest between his legs before engaging in a series of pelvic thrusts.

"Daddy, this is probably unappropriate," he said, smiling proudly. (And, for the record, I do realized the correct word is "inappropriate.")

"I'm pretending my gun is my willie!"

R. Lee Ermey would've had his ass. I just laughed my ass off.

"Dad...You Wanna Have a Catch?"

I don’t even have to watch the whole movie. I can aimlessly scroll through the channels and if I happen to hit Ray Kinsella asking John—Dad—if he wants to have a catch, then a saline solution quietly seeps from the corners of my eyes. That scene kills me.

Here’s why: I had the best father a young man could ever imagine having. The older we got, the stronger our relationship became; he was my best friend, someone I talked to every day, about everything. But, when I was a boy, we both missed out on a lot of those moments Ray and John shared at the end of “Field of Dreams.” My father was never absent, like John in the fictional film; he provided for his family, and satisfied my every want and need save for one. Games of catch were few and far between, and I am sure this fact was as hard (perhaps much harder) for him as it was for me. My father, then an All-American athlete on a football scholarship at Carolina, contracted polio when he was 18 years old. Despite a death sentence from his doctors, he won the war against polio, but his body forever bore the battle scars. My dad was a month shy of his 40th birthday when I was born, and by the time I was serious about baseball he was walking with a cane. Two metal braces, strapped to his thin thighs, snapped in to his specially-made shoes to steady him. His right shoulder, frayed from years of helping do the work his atrophied leg muscles refused to do, ached from the Nerf football tosses my mother shunned in the house. And we weren’t more than ten feet apart.

So it was a rare treat, for me at least, when, balky shoulder and broken body be damned, he gave into my constant requests for a game of catch. The routine was always the same. I snatched my well-worn Rawlings mitt and my best baseball, no matter that we would be playing catch in the driveway and it may get scuffed—this was a special occasion. Richie Zisk was not exactly a household name, but he was in my house, as his cursive signature was branded into the palm of my glove. I dragged the aluminum folding lawn chair from the carport, where my dad’s blue whale of an Oldsmobile 98 was taking a break from guzzling gas, its rear bumper jutting out into the driveway. I unfolded the chair and set it in place, buttressed against the pole of the adjustable basketball goal my dad would always promptly replace when my friends and I got big enough to dunk it.

He soon ambled out, feeling his way to the chair with his cane. Dad’s plaid, short-sleeve cotton shirt clashed with the orange and green woven nylon as he unlatched his braces, allowing the knees to bend, and collapsed into the chair, a little winded from a diaphragm weakened from polio and a paunch that extended a little further over his beltline each year. He was in his late forties, but when he sat his pants climbed to the heights of a much older man, revealing the blue wool dress socks he wore to work every day. The metal of his braces caught the sun and shone like the chrome from the Olds.

I don’t even remember if he wore a glove, but, owing to his leather-helmet era toughness, I seem to remember him shunning the protection of a mitt, snatching my pre-adolescent fastballs with his bare hands. Fortunately for him, I never had much of an arm, but thanks to my immovable target and the pressure of not wanting to screw this rare game up by short-hopping him in the shins, I developed pretty good command. Tired-armed coaches from little league through high school would later call upon me to throw batting practice, which was both a blessing and a curse. I was valued for my ability to consistently throw strikes, giving my teammates ample opportunity to take their hacks, but my rubber right wing would never be seen as anything more than a batting practice arm. Oh how I longed to pitch in a game.

Most of my childhood pitching dreams—protecting a one-run lead in game seven of the world series, bases loaded, two outs, a 3-2 count on the batter in the bottom of the ninth—were played out alone in the driveway, a tennis ball in my hand instead of cowhide. I gave a running play-by-play to my audience of bushes: “With two strikes on the batter, Schmidt inches back a step at third. Sandberg has a foot in the outfield grass at second. Sanders is set; he delivers…” It would’ve been nice to get strike three just once, but the brick wall of our house that served as my backstop predictably bounced a one-hopper back to me, and I tried not to bobble it before recording the last out and getting mobbed by imaginary teammates. Looking back, even if those dreams had come to fruition, they could never measure up to the satisfying smack of leather into the leather of my father’s strong hands. He would give me an enthusiastic “strrrrrrikkke threeee!” before a flick of the wrist lobbed the ball back to me. I never wanted to let him go. Damn the darkness. Damn the dinner bell.

* * *

So now, with no cornfield to plow, I wait, not for the prompt of voices, but for the next generation of father-son catches. The overzealous purchase of a mitt, bought for the occasion of Silas’s first birthday, has languished for years, gradually settling to the bottom of a bin along with the detritus of plastic baby toys. I reserve hope that one day the boy will take an interest in it, and he’ll ask me if I’d like to have a catch. I may have to explain to him that sometimes people cry because they are so happy.

Dog Will Hunt

I passed the remnants of an old apple orchard to the left. The occasional green apple, for whatever reason fallen too soon, crunched under rubber as my tires tried to keep traction on the road that was little more than a rocky runoff from a spring up the hill. Those rocks brought me here; I meant to harvest flat stone to use in one of the dozen or so overdue landscaping projects that may, if ever completed, fulfill my existence. But yard projects just churn on, like this uneven road, grinding and grinding.

I wasn’t alone on this uphill battle. Lina, who bears a close resemblance to her pariah dingo ancestors, and Dude, a golden retriever, trotted amiably along with their designated pack leader, a green, well-worn Honda Ridgeline. Dude takes the riskier path, tight by the truck cab’s driver door unless the narrow width of the sunken road forces him to higher ground. Lina stays a few inches off the back-left quarter panel, just at the rear bumper. I try to keep one eye trained on them, tongues wagging in the July heat, and one eye on the road. When the road allows me to speed up, they speed up; they slow when I slow. Too bad they tug like draft horses when they’re at the end of a leash.

I reached the end of the uphill climb where the road doglegs right over the creek, just past a bent and rusted “for sale” sign, and stopped right there in the middle of the track. Rush hour on this rocky trail is a hunter on a four wheeler passing by maybe once a month, once in a blue moon, so there’s no need to pull to the side, not that there’s much of a side anyway on a path so narrow that weeds clutching the road bank scrape the truck on both sides. A few days earlier Silas caught his first salamander here after it darted from a flat stone I pulled from the creek bank. It was a good spot not just for its easy access to the creek’s rocks, but also because the creek created a diversion for the boy while daddy did his work. But there would be no need for such a diversion today; the boy was at the bottom of the hill playing with a friend whose family rented one of the two still-habitable farm houses among the many old homesteads that dot the expansive property. I planned on steady work.

By the time the parking brake wrenched me in place, Lina and Dude had ambled into the pines that had taken over most of this forgotten landscape and carpeted it with a thick layer of brown needles. Though they quickly disappeared in the woods, I knew they would both reassume their pack position as soon as the engine fired again and they heard the call of rocks grinding under rubber.

Lina hunts and herds. Many a startled chipmunk or rabbit has sent her through the thicket in an impassioned but usually fruitless chase. She’s slow to give up, but eventually heeds my call to rejoin the pack and stands patiently while I pull the thorns. She delights in her power to send cattle on a stampede, or circle them in a tight knot, or at least she does until some angry farmer and his lead puts an end to it. I marvel at her herding instinct, and wonder where in her lineage she picked up the trait, but I don’t want to lose my best friend so I try not to encourage it.

When Lina herds she runs with a low, swift gait, gliding fearlessly but dangerously at the hind quarters of any cows that don’t start running before she gets close. I’ve never seen a rebel buck more than once before falling in line. On the hunt she is a different animal altogether, her wide, pointed ears perked instead of put back, her tail a backwards “C” over her haunches instead of held low. The coat at her withers scrunches forward and stands erect, changing her entire profile, and she bounds off four pogo sticks at her target like a bouncing wrecking ball off its chain. The herd is graceful; the hunt is pure power, or at least as much power as a 40-pound pup can muster.

It was the wrecking ball that broke the steady drone of flat stone thumping the hard plastic bedliner. Lina sawed through thin pine limbs, bounded behind me and across the road before disappearing downstream. I didn’t get a glimpse of what she was after. Dude trailed. I got a look at his expression and it seemed he was running more out of curiosity than sport.

I went for more rocks. This time my work was interrupted by a shrill and distant distress signal. I think now that my mind didn’t know what to make of the sound, so it made it into a familiar sound, a boy crying out. Had Silas followed me up the path and gotten hurt along the way? Did he get trampled by the stampede of dogs?

The cry definitely sounded human, but each time I called out for Silas the intermittent scream went silent. If it was Silas, or anything human that was hurt, and it had the lungs to muster a wail at regular intervals, then surely it would answer my shouts. My call should have elicited a response, not silence.

It was definitely animal. What did Lina sound like when she was hurt? I’ve seen her try to catch bumblebees in her mouth, all the while getting stung by the nest she disturbed, without ever so much as a flinch. Once I heard a little whelp when she twisted a paw wrestling with Dude. But what if she was really hurt? What if she was caught in some hunter’s trap? Would it sound like this?

I called for her. Again the distress signal faded away at the sound of my voice, only to pick up again after a moment of silence.

I kept calling as I worked, maybe another minute or two, filling the bed until the black of the bedliner floor had almost been rubbed out by rock. The cry was calling me, but the pull of uninterrupted work is strong when you have a boy out of school for the summer. After my initial panic, the voice of reason kept telling me it was nothing. Keep working.

Then Dude came back. Alone. Lassie he ain’t, but when I asked him, “Where’s Lina?” he turned back into the pines and I followed. It was hard to match his pace while performing the difficult eyesight balancing act of looking down for snakes and poison ivy while looking ahead to steal the first glimpse of what was making that foreign, forlorn noise. I tried to stay amongst the pines; closer to the creek progress was slowed by stream-fed weeds that have marched unchecked for decades.

The cries faded out as we drew closer. Dude dropped down the creek bank and Lina popped up downstream, just far enough away not to startle me but close enough to see she was fine. But it wasn’t Lina that Dude was taking me to. It wasn’t a kid. It wasn’t a dog. It was a deer, old enough to have outgrown its dappled days, but still elegant and fragile as the neck of a swan.

Bambi’s big sister was on her side, legs outstretched and motionless in the water. Her neck curled upward, allowing her tiny mouth to stretch out for air just at the stream’s edge. She breathed steadily. It wasn’t labored. Her black eyes showed a trace of fear; otherwise, I might’ve convinced myself she was reclining in the stream to shake the heat of this humid afternoon.

Dude went to her first, licking her ears and neck with what seemed like affection. Then he stretched out beside her and drank, between pants, from what I hoped wouldn’t be her watery grave. Lina stayed on the bank, as ordered, as I approached. When I got close, all four legs twitched as if to gallop, but she didn’t get up, she didn’t get away.

I made for the truck, less careful this time, briars gripping and ripping my ankles as I ran up the hill. I had left my phone sitting on the dash. Her lifeline. But the wildlife commission simply told me to let nature take its course. And when I got back to the creek bed, it had.

With one hand I brought her back hoofs together and lifted her from the stream to keep the imminent decay from contaminating it. Blood stained her white underside as a pair of fresh wounds, unplugged when I lifted her off the sandy creek edge, flowed anew.

I’ll never know what exactly happened. Was the deer injured in the chase? Had it already been hurt, and the dogs stumbled upon it after their earlier chase concluded? Was the deer in the clutches of a bobcat or panther, and Lina and Dude chased the cat off, causing it to abandon its prey? Not likely. The evidence suggests that Lina caught it and killed it, likely breaking its neck or severing its spine once she got her teeth dug in. I think I feel near equal parts pride and sorrow that I sleep with a killer.

* * *

On the ride home Silas asked me what that noise was.

“What do you mean, ‘that noise’?” I asked, playing dumb. I am sure I will never forget "that noise," and I am not surprised that he heard it too.

“That screaming noise from in the woods.”

My first instinct was to tell him that it was probably just an animal who got lost from its mommy, and that its mommy would be back soon to save it. But that seemed like a rotten thing to tell a kid whose mom left him when he was twenty months old, so I told him the truth.

You've Got to Crab Before You Can Walk

I'm not one to hold on to things. Mind you, there are likely multiple science experiments underway in the refrigerator at this very moment. Some people have poor hygiene; I have a poor housekeeping gene (though I suppose one could argue that the two are related). I have no sentimental attachment to the jug of greenish, curdled milk tucked behind the cavity-causing Juicy Juice in the back corner of the fridge. The leftover mystery meat, on a greasy plate covered with ill-fitting plastic wrap and an impressive layer of bubbling white mold, is not something I feel like I just can't part with. When I do hold on to things too long it's likely due to that defective gene, not to mention a severe case of being time-management challenged, but it does not owe to a sense of nostalgia. My collection of keepsakes could fit in a frozen pizza box (which reminds me that I need to throw away some leftover frozen pizza as soon as I can find the time).

The fridge, at least, is off limits--"That's an adult door!"--but I have a little helper in the collection of considerable clutter in all other corners of our humble abode. The boy must have over a thousand toys strewn in various outposts around the house, some draped in dust and cobwebs. If I ask him if we can get rid of some of his stuff he never plays with anymore, his answer is predictable. Not only does he refuse to yield his stash, he even wants to hold on to each and every spent battery that's popped out of his DC-powered toys. Occasionally I'll sneak something out to the trash if it's beyond repair, or find a place to donate it if the toy might yet pique the interest of another child. He hasn't busted me tiptoeing out to the trash or noticed anything missing yet. I imagine that if I dared look hard enough under his bed, the place where he bulldozes all of his belongings on the rare occasion when he "cleans" his room, it would be like a free trip to the toy store thanks to all the things we would rediscover. Things that, despite not having been played with in months, he would never consider giving away.

I do have a 2T Hines Ward replica jersey to honor the one for the thumb*, but other than that I haven't kept any of his clothes, not even the cute little flannel footed PJs. If I ever did dare a recon mission under the bed and found an old pair of jeans lurking there from the days when clothes were measured in months rather than years, I would hand them down without a second thought. I can guarantee two things about those hypothetical pants. First, they would have an adjustable waistband. The straps, pulled to the tightest setting, would dangle all the way down inside the legs. Noah might've been a better name for the boy. If you put him in pants that actually fit his waist it appears as if he is preparing for a flood. His pants are always cinched up like a Hefty sack, but, as I look down to see how my waistline has expanded in my middling years, I suppose that's not such a bad problem to have.

Nowadays the knees in his pants survive for two weeks, tops. He is fond of building up a bit of steam and sliding across hardwood floors on his knees, and the boy spends the bulk of his day scuttling back and forth on his leg joints overseeing various construction projects (Legos, wooden blocks, train tracks--if you can build it, he will come). But the second thing I can guarantee about that hypothetical pair of 6-9 month jeans from years ago is that the knees will be good as new. When the boy was a baby, he didn't crawl on his knees at all, but rather his hands and feet, thus sparing pant knee fabric from wear and tear. I've heard it called bear crawling and pushup crawling, but to me Silas's style most resembled a ghost crab, the kind beachcombers illuminate with flash lights on midnight strolls. Rather than lumbering to his den like a bear, Silas hurried and scurried about with great speed, like the next toy he was after was the safety of a sandy burrow.

You see those commercials on TV with the parents, trendy new recording device in hand, catching baby's first steps with looks of unimaginable glee on their faces. I had that look. But what they don't show you in those commercials is the aftermath. Junior's increased mobility leads to louder sounding thuds, as junior now falls faster and from further up than he did when crawling. Junior's new perspective also leads to a whole new round of baby-proofing, but the worst side-effect of this walking experiment is that junior is...gone. A few days ago you could set the little booger on the carpet, go hunt the remote or maybe hold your nose while you pull your favorite beverage from the fridge, come back, and there's junior, right on the carpet where you left him. Take your eye off the little booger now and you're putting out an APB. It's like a daddy bird returning to the nest with a nice mouthful of regurgitated worms only to find that the chicks have flown the coop. They don't develop this walking skill to not use it, so just when you think you're past the worst of it--the sleepless nights and all the times your shirt was used as a barf bullseye--baby steps run you ragged.

Silas, perhaps owing to his crab crawl technique, achieved the joyous milestone of walking at an early age. (It was nine months and four days, but who's counting?) He was already on his feet, and it didn't take long for him to start pulling himself upright on couches and coffee tables. All that's left is to let go. During his first "Look dad, no hands" moments, he wobbled like a tightrope walker, arms outstretched for balance. He would take a step or two on those baby bowlegs, then cling fast to the nearest support as he mustered courage for another attempt. He had taken a step or two in this fashion hundreds of times, but it wasn't until he took six full steps, away from the wall he had been using as a crutch, that I considered it his first walk. I was on the phone almost before his rump, cushioned by a mound of ill-fastened cloth diapers (I wrap babies about like I wrap presents--poorly), hit the hardwood floor.

"Silas is walking!" I exclaimed to my dad as the boy sat with a bemused look, legs stretched out in a V. "Six steps without holding on to anything."

The boy pulled himself up and went back to work on walking. I was his destination, so I crept backwards, trying to encourage him to beat his personal best. Eight steps. Thump. Ten steps. Thump. The next day we were off to show the grandparents, and four days later he was running. RUNNING.

And I am forever playing catchup to my little ghost crab.



* For the sports challenged, "one for the thumb" refers to the Pittsburgh Steelers' fifth Super Bowl victory (and the championship ring that comes with it).

Snakes Alive (part deux)

(Before reading, scroll down and read "Snakes Alive," the prequel to this entry.)

I put the boy down on the cool patio of river stones and dragged the cooler over the log, hair still erect on the back of my reddening neck from our encounter with the snake. We tiptoed silently up the bank to the fork in the river, the place where our pebbled beach was widest, and I tucked the cooler under the shade of some scrubby brush to keep it out of the sun. While I gathered smooth, round stones for skipping, the boy pried the biggest rocks he could muster out of the sand and gave them a sudden, satisfying bath along the river's edge, delightedly giggling each time the displaced water from a shot-putted rock soothed the heat off his skin. It was a hot afternoon. Meanwhile, I picked out a target. It's not enough to just skip the stones; I hoped to hit a distant rock rising from the river's surface. Silas wasn't impressed, even when a perfect stone, launched with my best Kent Tekulve submarine motion, skipped too many times to count. He had seen a thousand stones skipped and a thousand concentric circles radiating from where the stones left their mark on the water.

Kent Tekulve demonstrating the proper form to skip a rock.

"Dadda, can we catch crawdads now?" he asked, substituting the "y" with an "a" to compliment the persuasiveness of his tone.

"Not yet, I've got to hit that rock."

He knew I meant it. He grunted, and, though he was already thoroughly soaked despite not setting foot in the water, he went back to unceremoniously returning large rocks to the river to pass the time until a skipping stone found its target. It's easy to skip a stone, but no two are precisely alike in weight or shape, so aim is another matter entirely. But after gathering another round of ammunition, I finally grazed the target.

"Got it!"

"Oh daddy," he grumbled, shaking his head. It was the toddler equivalent of a teenager saying, "It's about time, old man."

He went for the gear, a bucket and a Cars minnow net with Lightning McQueen smiling from the plastic handle. If I had one tenth of the merchandising sales from that movie we would have butlers bringing us our crawdads while we lounged in a Biltmore House-sized estate. A Cars minnow net? They left no stone unturned. And neither would we. Wordlessly, the boy handed me the net and then plunged the bucket down to catch the river, finally getting his frog wellies in the water. Here, in shallow water and out of the reach of the strongest current, the riverbed stones collected a fine moss that attracted tiny snails. We tried to take care with our footing, both to remain balanced on the slippery stones and to mind the mollusks. The boy brought the bucket back to the bank before rejoining me in the shallows. All there was left to do was slip a slimy rock out of place and see what darted out. More often than not on this stretch of the river, each displaced rock meant a displaced crawdad. Sometimes, eluding the net, a homeless crawdad would find shelter under an adjacent rock only to realize that there was no vacancy. They are territorial little boogers, so the smaller of the two would hit the open river, or the net if I was quick enough. Soon, we had a bucket half full of unhappy boogers climbing on top of each other in hopes of breeching the rim of a bucket shadowed by the watchful posture of a boy.

When Silas started pegging the would-be escape artists with pebbles I told him it was probably time to let them go. Forever in his passively defiant state, the boy had a suitable compromise. He informed me that we would construct what he called a "quarium" to house them, making the crawdads free from the confines of the bucket, but not entirely free. The rock walls went up at the edge of river, and before long we had what looked like a miniature campsite fire pit ready to call the crawdads home. He took the net and fished them out of the bucket, shaking the net ever so not gently until they found their way into the pit. Each one, like a newborn sea turtle, instinctively made for the water, only to find their path obstructed by our hastily constructed pit. The smallest amongst them would wedge their way out eventually, but the boy was waiting between the quarium and the water, and after recapturing the jail breaker he would examine the pit and patch its weak points with a few more stones. Fortunately for the captive crawdads, the one thing the boy likes better than building things is destroying them, and after I promised lunch after their release, Silas went Godzilla on the quarium and our pinchy playmates scurried back to the safety of their rocky river home.

Our shadows had shifted to the east, so lunch was long overdue. We rinsed our hands in the river water, though the boy quickly used his grimy shirt as a towel, recasting his tiny fingers in grit. Watching a boy eat a PB & J with filthy hands, smearing a mixture of the sandwich's filling across his face and sleeve in the process, is the sort of thing that might make you recoil in germaphobic horror before you're a parent, but somehow it doesn't bother you when it's your kid, especially if he trained you for this moment with volcanic outbursts of spit up all through his first year. He made his way through the meal as I looked on, toothlessly grinning. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing your kid eat. He offered back a smile full of teeth; a bit of purple oozed through the gaps. But at least he didn't show me an open mouth full of food. Progress.

After the boy shotgunned a sippy full of Juicy Juice we burned off the sugar buzz with a wade through the water, his hand, pink from the chill of the river, seeking the warmth of my own hand whenever the water got deep enough to flood his wellies. Deep, rushing water is one of the few things that triggers his fear mechanism. That and snakes, but by now the snake that greeted us was a distant memory. Shivering in his drenched swimsuit and t-shirt, the boy made his way to shore, ready for the hike back to the truck once I pried off his wet things. The jelly stains in his fresh set of clothes were faded from the wash.

When we got home I pulled out the laptop and googled snakes of North Carolina. According to the Davidson College snake identification website, "The northern watersnake is often mistaken for the cottonmouth because of its dark coloration and habitat preferences." It wasn't even a poisonous snake after all.