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eBook details

• Title: Sound Memories (Essay)
• Author : Shenandoah
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 75 KB

Description

The condominium we stayed at on the Gulf Goast was across the road from the beach, and our apartment looked out on a long brackish lagoon with a freshwater feed at its eastern end and a narrow pass into the Gulf of Mexico. I liked the view. I have not been an enthusiastic beachcomber for a number of years, and found looking out at the uniform vastness of the Gulf to be alternately boring and intimidating. I enjoyed watching the small sailboats and fishing boats on the lagoon--people "messing about in boats." I have done a good bit of such messing about, and the activity on the lagoon gave to the watery world an aspect of cozy utility I found deeply satisfying. I watched the boat traffic by the hour and saw every level of outdoor competence from commercial crabbers and local fishermen to dry-land fathers with no experience renting sailboats to eater to their families' demand for fun on the water. At fifty dollars an hour, many families failed to get fifty yards from the pier. I observed one such family: the children whined about their slow progress as jet skis whizzed by and sprayed them with their rooster-tail wakes, and their mother observed loudly over the noise of the jet skis, "We're not going. Why aren't we going? There's plenty of wind." The father, embarrassed to be so obviously incompetent in such a public situation, became increasingly frantic and ill-tempered, and near the end of his hour rental he jumped overboard and pulled the boat back to the dock. The long-haired and deeply tanned young man in charge of boat rentals was polite and kept a straight face. Early one morning I went out with a cup of coffee and watched an old man walk down to the dock carrying a cast net in a five gallon plastic bucket. His hair was gray and cut very short. He wore long pants, a short-sleeve plaid shirt and dirty tennis shoes without socks. His face was weathered from a working life outside, and he stood a long time reading the water as if he would learn something from it. He had the dock nearly to himself just as day broke, and he seemed out of place in a resort full of mostly young people decked out in expensive beach fashion. I imagined him a grandfather brought along on the family's beach vacation, but no more inclined to sit in a beach chair or body-surf than I was. Under other circumstances, he might have preferred to stay home, but he could not pass up a week with his children and grandchildren. He was right at home when he lifted the cast net out of the bucket and began to work the incoming tide. The beach may not have appealed to him, but he knew the lagoon, even though he may never have set eyes on it before. Throwing a cast net for mullet seemed habitual for him. The net he used was big--I guessed about twelve feet--and he threw it time after time in a perfect circle. A twelve-foot net with lead weights around the skirt is heavy, and yet the old man's movements were economical and effortless, energetic and liturgical. Done right, throwing a net is a graceful activity--an ancient dance, the steps of which are as old as the first fisherman.

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