Live Bait

Down south, near any body of water there is always a river shack that sells a few things and has a limited menu of local foodstuff. These are almost always very cool places, smoked mullet, fried catfish, turtle fritters, and in the window, always a neon sign, in red and blue, LIVE BAIT. The bait itself varies by location. It might be minnows or crickets, or crabs, or worms, and sometimes even very large shiners; usually a counter, and a couple of tables. Usually another couple of tables outside, bad, shimmed tables, that rocked about. Eating boiled crabs is messy business. My parents took over Clark's Camp on Julington Creek, off the St John's, when the Clarks needed a week in the Keys. Good money but brutal work, before dawn until after dark, but never a dull moment. Cotton-Mouth Moccasins and alligators. Otters and bob-cats and the occasional bear. I never knew such a spread of wildlife. Pelican in a reduced gravy, fresh water mussels, completely purged and steamed in salted water, or a batch of minnows fried crisp in tempura batter. Most minnows are miniature sturgeon. Black Dell is getting finicky. She's running hot and I have to shut down in the middle of the day. 89 degrees tomorrow, and I'll have to turn on the AC for a couple of hours, and it seems too early in the year, I just had a fire a couple of weeks ago. I'll do what I have to, but I do hate being manipulated. So I change my schedule, getting up early in the morning, in the dark, and writing for a few hours in the coolness. I don't turn on the AC until I get back inside after a walk or mushroom hunt. It actually got to 90 degrees today (the sides of my nose and my temples start to sweat at 90) and it was 86 inside. Dell needs to be 79-80 to not complain too loudly, which takes at least an hour. I read, clean up, heat left-overs or start a dinner, eat something, get a drink, roll a smoke. I was thinking about latches and gates, reading an excellent essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg, about making hay in the Big Horn, and how every outbuilding had its own unique set of hinges and a latch fabricated from knotholes and horseshoes. When you're twenty miles from a hardware store and goats are birthing, you get good at jury-rigging. I always loved that aspect of being remote, solving problems without easy access to easy solutions. I've made hay in several different parts of the country, and I actually had watched the method under discussion, many times, at a ranch outside Gunnison, Colorado; local beef, driven into the high country, then down in winter to munch fibrous stalks and the seed-heads of Blue Stem. It's easy to forget that dried shit and sod is so much a part of our heritage. Andrew is like Paula Poundstone, he doesn't believe anything I say, and I respect that, but Linda knows there wasn't that much fiction between what I had projected and what might have happened. It's the reality of nature. Two Goldfinches constitute a universe. Me and it.