Protandrous

Worked outside until I had achieved a full-body sweat, then did the two bucket shower on the deck. Read an interesting essay on oysters last night, then slashing brush today, remembered my five year love affair with them. Cape Cod, working with the crew called Local Talent, the funniest construction gang in I've ever been involved with. Les and Ralph could wake the dead, sent several people to the emergency room laughing so hard they couldn't breathe. Natural mimics, they once reproduced several episodes of "The Honeymooners" when they were doing a remodel for one of the writers of that show, and the performance is become apocryphal in memory. Les was a boat-builder and sincerely thought there was a boat for everyone, decided I needed a pirogue, because of my attraction to tidal zones. We built the boat, an amazing experience, and then I poled it everywhere up tidal basins. It drew two inches with two people and a cooler, I could take it across spartina, it was like an airboat. Result was I seeded select and private places, inaccessible without a pirogue and I had the only one, with blue mussels and oysters. There were already some, that I was harvesting, but these are easy critters to farm, and I introduced them into perfect habitat. Sometimes I had to make the habitat perfect, which was why they were not there, because there was nothing solid to attach to; so I'd haul in some rocks, at one place, MO7, I had a map, I needed a map to keep track, I lined a deep hole on Quivet Creek with radiators I'd hauled from the dump. When some shellfish are small, pin-head size, there can be thousands on a rock, one rock per hole and two years later you harvest, no pesticides, no plowing the middles. If people didn't shit in water, this could go on forever. Fouling your nest. Oysters out the bejesus, mussels like there was no tomorrow. Then The Vineyard, where I found an oyster bed that was considerably larger than a football field, yielded my income for several years plus all I could eat, no small feat, considering the guests you might expect on an island off the coast. Oysters are protandrous, a neat trick, like sea-horses and certain friends that spent time in jail. The ocean side of the island, fuck the "r" months, I could eat these year round though they were funky mid-summer, unmentionable cuisine. Kept bushels of shellfish under a bed of seaweed, doused with fresh seawater twice a week. Friends thought we were rich because we ate oysters at every meal, little did they know otherwise we'd have starved. We had to leave, couldn't afford to live that rich, but I still remember the bed, the road went on forever and the party never ends. Crustaceans. Crawdads qualify, but it was years before I saw the connection. Jeff Muldar in the background, a blues song about you best friend's brother, a niece twice removed, what you didn't do. I still don't know why. I should have, you know, taken advantage of the situation, but I was shell-shocked. Now I see it as a kind of joke, what I should have done. What's in a name? The rain's rolling in. I'd better go. I'm still confused, but I don't care anymore, home is where you find it. A banjo tune. Bela pulling everything together from a few threads. Then the power is out. Beginning to bore me, the daily failures. Still out in the morning, and the phone, have to go out to call the power company. The lady there is friendly and funny, -darling, you are the end of the line- which is true, and she allows the problem fixed by next week, upgrading something, adding something, I don't really even know what electricity is, lightning in a cable. Small load of firewood but the pile groweth, nearly made my nut I suspect. I'll burn the Wrack Show in the fall, recut all the new stuff and get in under the shed. A plan. Wood stacked and jumbled everywhere now, but it's too hot to work on firewood, other than just collecting it, which I mostly do before work, in the cool, and don't unload until even earlier the next morning. Used the sling blade this morning and drenched with sweat after 10 minutes. Finally caught a mouse that had been driving me crazy. Little fucker was getting outrageously blatant. Had learned to trip the trap and then eat the peanut butter. I put a stick-ramp going from a shelf in the pantry (the pantry looks exactly like a bookcase because that's what it is) to another stick that was cantilevered over a bucket with some water in it. Works every time for that occasional smart mouse. They're good divers, but they can't tread water forever. I don't enjoy killing things, but if they threaten my food supply I get pissed, figure out some Rube Golberg way to kill them, so I'm not directly involved. I was drinking whiskey on the patio. Happened to look at someone's watch, to note the time, I've never worn a watch, but I always know what time it is.