My thirteenth year in Houston, Texas proved to be a time of firsts and lasts. On the cusp of my family’s permanent return to Canada, we visited my grandmother in Beaumont, Texas. My father remained in Houston and was scheduled to pick us up for the ride home. My grandfather, a ship’s engineer, was away at sea en route to India. My mother, grandmother, my two sisters and I decided to go to the old folk’s cabin on the nearby Gulf of Mexico. My grandfather had built it in the Sixties, in a tiny sea-side community called Gilchrist. The girls went dancing at night and we all went to the beach during the days.
After a few days at the beach cabin, I had a strong desire to go fishing. It was an activity that I had, up to that time, only ever done in the company of my grandfather. My father didn’t do those sorts of activities. But grandfather wasn't due in port for months to come. I saw his old orange Datsun pick-up sitting under the house pilings and I asked my grandmother if I could have the keys. She knew that the old man had taught me to drive on the beach a few years before and she said it was OK.
The little truck had been hand-painted with a brush. It was marine grade rust paint borrowed from the Sun Oil company. The engine had been carefully dismantled and scrubbed clean, then re-assembled. All the parts that would take paint had been painted in different colours. It had made it easier for me to learn their names as I watched the old Swede work on it when he was home and I was on vacation. It looked like a toy but ran smooth as a brand new Singer sewing machine. My grandfather, his Beagle dog Skipper and I were the only people allowed inside it.
I gathered my tackle and loaded up the truck. I had no driver's license nor a fishing license, so I was ready for a proper Texas day. I chose a place we locals affectionately called the “Cut.” It was a machine dug canal that linked the Gulf of Mexico with Galveston Bay near Gilchrist, Texas on the Bolivar Peninsula. It was lined with huge, thick corrugated iron slabs that had been rusting away for decades. Joining the open sea with the bay, via this man-made short-cut had predictably created a fish superhighway.
It was a ten minute drive from Erik’s cabin which he had named The Last Voyage. Soon I was on site and all set up. I was using the usual bait of that region, which is fresh shrimp about the size that people use for their stir-fries. My line was rigged with a tear-drop lead weight and a barbed hook leader off a three-way brass swivel about a foot up the mono-filament line, that some call a “Carolina Rig.” My rod was a little Zebco spin-caster I had been gifted with by my grandfather. That day was the first time I had ever driven by myself and the first time I had ever been fishing alone. It felt good but kind of tight like new hiking boots.
There were two men fishing pretty close by on my right. They were drinking beer, joking and smoking Cuban cigars. Only one of the two was trying to fish. He went through the usual ritual of asking what I was fishing for and what bait I was using. My nonspecific reply disappointed him somewhat. I have always been a hunter at heart and not a sportsman. I fish for food. The only reason I would release a caught fish is because it was too small or it was poisonous to eat.
My inquisitor was fishing for flounders specifically. He wore Bermuda shorts, which I considered unmanly at the time, and a sweat-stained tank-top that struggled to contain his girth. As his unlucky day dragged on, he caught crab after crab. Big beautiful Atlantic Blue crabs. They had crème coloured bellies, brilliant orange claw-tips with cobalt highlights and mud-coloured backs. My sister and I had caught hundreds over our Summers at the cabin and they tasted as good as they looked. The flounder man treated all those assembled to tirades of falstaffian dialogue every time he landed one.
What bothered me most was that he simply whacked the poor creatures onto the hard packed oily sand and left them to slowly bake in the unforgiving Texas sun. The iron walls of the Cut had three feet of free board left in those days, so the eight-legger’s only options were to walk two hundred yards to the bay or cross a busy Texas highway.
After awhile, there were seven or eight big crabs scuttling around trying to find shade and blowing masses of bubbles. From time to time Bermuda would turn around and spew random maledictions to those outcast crustaceans. He explained to me in a fatherly aside, that he was catching all those crabs because “when yoo fish fer flowner, yoo gotta lechur line sat steel.”
“’Em bag ole flowners bury they seffs inna san, ma bwa. Gotta lave yer bait steel n’lettem creep on up-tuit, like at. Thas the prollum widdeese Got-daym raggedy-ass crabs. Crab kin mauve a lot fasser an ‘em ole fat flowners. Nao, ‘em flowners, thas one lazy-ass fish.”
“You bin hyer fer four ‘ours, an ain't cot nothin’ but turd-wrasslers an ‘em blue-claw sons-a-bitches,” said his stringy shirtless, deep tanned and highly tattooed side-kick with a grin as he opened another two bottles of Lone Star.
I caught some big crabs and put them in a galvanized tub we kept in the truck bed with a little sea water for my grandmother to cook. I picked up the refugees left stranded by the complete angler. Other than the crabs, I had only caught a zebra-striped fish called a Drum that was too small to keep and a few baby catfish.
When I was starting to get low on shrimp, I started popping my weight up and down, as a way of discouraging the crabs, who had evidently spread word of the feast to be had. They were congregated by the score just below us. I figured that the little puffs of sand and silt would keep them off my bait and steer them over to Bermuda's motionless bait to my starboard.
The flounder man continued fishing and stranding each crab that he caught. His cohort, due to his idle hands, started drinking in earnest. I looked around to check on the whereabouts of an exceptionally big crab that Bermuda had ignominiously banged against the hot iron barrier until it had finally released its grasp. It had scuttled around the beer bottles and cigar butts seeking shade under my grandfather’s truck. It was still there, with its mandibles seething froth and its stalk-mounted eyes surveilling the situation. I'd decided to retrieve it before my next cast.
As I fished, I continued checking on that crab. After about ten minutes it began to move. Rapidly describing a clock-wise arc, it came athwart the iron wall. There was a precious little shade there and after a brief pause, the blue continued crab-wise past my position. I was worried about its fate when it hailed into striking range of its unsympathetic captor. Slowing incrementally, it crept closer to its cigar chomping nemesis.
The fisherman, adamantly determined to catch himself a flounder, was in a deep Theta state brought on by the tepid alcohol, the extreme heat and his exertions with unwanted crustaceans. I watched out of one eye as the roving crab sidled up unnoticed to that man's right big toe, which poked out of his cheap red flip-flops. His belly occluded his sight-line to his feet. After a brief depth of field scan with its eye-stalks, the crab raised a mighty pincer like Excalibur. It hovered motionless for a second and then sank into Bermuda’s toe, down to the bone and with an ease that looked positively hydraulic to my eye.
It was a clearly premeditated, precision attack. I learned then and there, that all animals are not stupid, all have feelings, all possess spirit and all possess memory. The flounder man howled like a pig at slaughter and jumped back two feet. His partner nearly choked with laughter at the karmic irony as they tried to pry it off. So tight was the clamp, that in the end, they had no choice but to amputate the entire pincer and wait for the muscle to release its contraction. The brave one-clawed crab was flung by the tipsy tattooed man far into the sea and I had no doubt that it would begin growing a new claw immediately.
The men bandaged up the wound, which was considerable and they said they'd best be going home. I also decided to stop fishing and began to reel in my line. After taking the two turns of slack out, I hit a massive snag. I walked left and right and pulled like the devil. All to no avail. I returned to my original position and reeled hard. My fibreglass rod bent straight down to the water.
The two gentlemen stayed behind to sip beer and give me advice through the window of their pick-up truck and I tried all their tricks for freeing a snag. I tried all of my grandfather’s tricks. After much ado, there was no other choice left to me but to break my line. It was something I hated to do because it was like giving up. Besides, the tackle cost money, as my grandfather liked to remind me. With a heavy heart, I reeled up as much as I could without shattering the rod itself. Then, I wound my fist around the line several times and heaved like a Barcelona stevedore to part the line.
The line bit into my hand and suddenly went as slack as a leaf falling off a tree. It was akin to pulling a tooth. I began to reel in rapidly. It was a bad way to end my day. Especially so, as it was my premonition that this was very likely the last time I would ever fish at that boyhood spot.
Next, contrary to all logic and previous experience, my severed line became snagged. My rod again bent double. My brain couldn't sort out what was going on and I stared in wide-eyed disbelief. I shot a teenage glace skyward and thought the words, “God, Dude, are you fucking serious?”
How in the sweet and precious hell a parted line could get snagged, was beyond my ken. I was beginning to get angry. A few seconds later, I found that I could just barely reel a few turns, if only very slowly. I peered into the murky warm Gulf water. I figured that my little spin-caster’s inner workings had been severely damaged somehow. It was a fitting end. I was about to leave a place that I had loved since I was a small boy and the only place I had ever felt truly free. Stubbornly, I reeled with a constrained slow motion.
Yet, again my line went slack as a spider’s silk in a breeze and I simultaneously saw a wide flash of brilliant iridescence under the muddy yellow chop. It was a big one! By now, the two gentlemen were out of their vehicle and soberly yelling commands and instructions on either side of me. With their adrenaline fueled encouragement, I reeled up a four pound flounder. It was the biggest fish I had ever caught and it was a flawless, beautiful specimen.
Both men congratulated me and Bermuda said he was glad they stayed because his toe didn't hurt anymore. He was also glad I'd caught that fish in order to prove to his doubting friend that there were indeed some “bag ole lazy flowners dug down in the san, right unner our fate.” His side-kick insisted that I drink a celebratory beer with them. It was my first beer in the company of adults. After covering up my tub of crabs with some old wet burlap, I drove back to The Last Voyage, a boy no longer.
The look on my grandmother’s face when I showed her that fish, is still etched on my mind. We boiled up the crabs with Zatarain’s crab boil that afternoon and had a delicious feast on the deck. We took the fish back to Beaumont, so we could cook it up when my father came to pick us up. It fed the six of us and even caused my stoic father to raise his eyebrow.
That raised paternal eyebrow is also still etched in my mind. It was the first time I recalled seeing surprised admiration on that man’s face. As we ate the corn-meal breaded flounder with fresh lemon juice squeezed on top, my grandmother kept calling that fish a “golly-whopper" and said she couldn’t wait to tell my grandfather about it when he got home from his voyage. I looked at her across the table and felt myself in the spiritual company of the first hunter, at the first fire, watching the first woman smile the first smile.
fin