Scooped
up a bucket of sand at Grand Sandbanks to refill the shallow layer of dingy
gray sand in the two entryway ashtrays at work. I chose a light colored spot,
stuck the lip of my vessel against it and stamped my foot. An avalanche filled
the mixing bowl. Now every time I walk through the doors during winter I will
fondly remember our sweet summer swimming spot.
Wanting
to plant tomatoes at home I scouted out a prime spot in the backyard, one with
at least 6 hours of sunlight. I ve grown tomatoes now and again during
the past twenty years but never in a site with satisfactory sun. The south side
of the house where I ve planted six sunflowers gets only three or four
hours, I discovered too late. Poor planting. Maybe the neighbors will let me
stick the Cherry 100 and Better Boy in their front yard, which gets great sun
by late-morning. They ve been extremely accommodating and generous with
their means, bringing delicious Swiss steak and fried zucchini slices, and even
snow-blowed my driveway last winter, because they like EZ. Maybe
they d water and weed and provide tomato cages and fencing and deer
repellent granules and drape blankets too, when the weatherman threatens a
freeze. I d certainly show up in late August and help harvest the crop.
To
encourage my plants to produce at an unprecedented extent I bought a fishing
license to catch-up a slew of small perch or rock bass to tuck in around the
roots for supplemental nutrition. Caleb gave me a new fishing reel for Father s
Day last year and I want to hook it up and see what it can do. It s got a
built-in vibrator feature--flick a lever and fish are supposed to go wild and
bite better.
2:10 p.m.-
The water level is down, already at a late-July low. The narrow passage
into SSC--where Kinsey and I pulled out the two logs in May--is non-negotiable,
cris-crossed with inch- and two-inch thick sticks that, last week, weren't
a problem to pass over.
The
beaver has been hard at work, opportunistically harvesting small saplings from
the near bank and dragging them across the narrows so the current could hold
them against pillars he d drilled into place late at night, with Quikcrete,
or something that hard. I tugged and sweated and flung mucky ten-foot long
trees up onto the bank. Then, when done and motoring upstream away from the
work, I began questioning leaving Beaver s construction materials all in
a heap, so he could easily drag them into the river and tongue-and-groove them,
with glue, back into place tonight.
The
.22 is somewhere in the house. But that seems disproportionately unbalanced,
like sending 130,000 technologically charged boys into a small mid-eastern
country to inconvenience and unsettle perfectly good people whose only sin is
living there during the regime of a venal Texas cowboy.
2:55-
Glitter
Beach. The campsite is high above water now with grass clumps sprouting softly
on the level, beckoning for someone to stay the night soon.
A
couple of holes dug into the back yard did not provide any worms, so I splurged
and bought approximately
30 leaf worms at the Gas Plaza. (In previous years I have always trusted
that there were 30 in the cottage cheese tub and I
never had the need to count each one out, for reassurance that I was not being
cheated while fishing.)
I
tied a yellow Beetle Spin® onto my favored micro-weight
rod-and-reel. When out-of-practice fingers try to knot nearly invisible 4-LB
line after feeding it through tiny micro-weight rod holes, a man quickly learns
that such fine line is hard to feel in the fingers, and is surprisingly full of
life of its own, coiled inside the spool all winter in the storage room.
Current
drifted the boat into shallow water where big fish might be waiting.
First
cast.
The
lure flew 6 feet and stopped. The worm kept going and dippled the water thirty
feet farther next to a lily pad.
I
swore, rewound the reel, un-tangled the Beetle Spin®, put on a
fresh worm, and cast again. The worm landed right where I wanted, but the
Beetle Spin rebounded and clinked into the boat two inches from
EZ s nose, which recoiled and sniffed at it. So I screwed off the reel
housing for a better look at what the hell was going on inside.
Very
little line in there, actually only a few feet of line, including the knot tied
around the armature spool.
Oh
yeah. I forgot a seasonal aesthetic.
In
December I brought home twelve glass Christmas bulbs, gold and purple, to hang
from the ceiling around my desk, suspended by micro-light fish line where they
could sway X-masly in the furnace-forced breeze.
Okay.
Get out the new reel attached to a scary six-foot long rod and thread line
through the eyelets. Knot a loop in the end and tie on a swivel clasp, and put
on the Beetle Spin® with a new worm for it.
Fish
paid no attention to my trickery, but we had a nice time drifting down river,
sharing early summer sights like the flash-of-orange oriole that swooped out of
the sky and disappeared inside a copse of tag alders.
3:44-
The
jerk on the rod was unmistakably a really fun fish. I responded by cranking the
knob, but nothing happened. The line dove deeper into the river and the rod
bent into a classic Arkansas television curve. I turned and turned the
retrieval crank but the other end of the line with my yellow Beetle Spin®
stayed away down deep. So I attended to tightening the drag, you know, that
nautical-looking star circle between the crank handles and the reel body. As I
turned it right tight the fish let go and I, with tighter drag
wound in a worm-less Beetle Spin®.
I
tried futilely to catch even one puny no-care fish to fertilize my tomato
plants, for just one summer. Nothing filled my need. So I stopped by the market
going home and bought a 21-ounce frozen box of fish sticks to feed to the
tomatoes.