Land Forms

Managed to spend most of the day immersed in The Dictionary Of Americanisms. Hammock, hummock, hassock, tussock, knob, knoll. When I looked up, it was already after lunch time. Stopped what I was doing, made some corn cakes and a cheese omelet, read an interesting piece in The London Review by Jenny Diski about living with Doris Lessing. Somehow, along the way, I was reading part of Darwin's book on coral atolls. He'd never seen a coral island, and yet he got it correctly. Pretty amazing, actually. Spent most of the afternoon (too hot, Black Dell was closed down, didn't want to walk then pick off ticks) cooking a dish to last for a couple of days. I make a pot of rice, a pecan flavor from Louisiana, then caramelized a large Spanish onion and a red pepper, then fried sliced chorizo sausage. This is very good, the meat explodes out of its casing, into strange shapes, and the onions and peppers are so sweet they make me want to write a Romance Novel. A cut-off is a channel made where's a big bend in a river, to save the bother and the distance; between Cairo, Illinois and New Orleans, between 1706 and 1882 the distance was cut from 1,215 miles to 973. I've fished some of those great ox-bow lakes, Horseshoe Lake (northwestern Mississippi), and Tunica Cut-Off, and they were great expeditions. We'd rent a cabin, one room, a sink, water at the well, one of those what I think of as Park Service grills, inch thick cast iron and a stout cooking surface, for ten bucks a night. We'd go over of Friday evening, in time to fish for an hour or two. Mom had her kit, for feeding us, some bacon fat, some cornmeal. Saturday we'd fish all morning, then come in for a great fish lunch, take a nap, then go back out and fish through the afternoon. Stay another night, and fish through the following morning before heading home. We'd take home enough fish for a neighborhood fry, baked beans and slaw, hush-puppies, it doesn't get much better than that. With the knife I use for filleting, honed to a razor's edge, I can take a boneless fillet off a flatfish, I can take a boneless fillet off a small perch, I sometimes mince garlic and shallots. But really, hush-puppies, dipped in a dark sesame sauce, anchovies and rotted small fish, is as good as it gets. The radio was calling for serious weather, storms, hail, chance of tornados, a flood alert, so I got to town and back home in record time. Whiskey, cigaret papers, some sweet potatoes and a London Broil, juice. Got home just as the first rain started, felt as if I'd flanked what could have been a rough spot. Skipped going to the library, because I sensed I didn't have time, which I didn't, but I'm mostly researching words right now and I have all the necessary books at hand. Enough of the necessary books, at any rate, to occupy me for an un-specified unit of time. Home, hard rain on the metal roof and I put away supplies, thinking about the various meanings of borrow, barrow, and burrow. Had skipped stopping at the pub too, which is extreme for me, the crew there is my main social contact, but I'd picked up a can of Foster's when I stopped for papers, so I had a beer with a late lunch of sardines, grape tomatoes, cheese (a great Irish cheddar), and saltine crackers. I could sense that the rain was imminent, when I got to town, so I compressed what I needed to accomplish into the fewest possible moves. I didn't need to stop at the ATM because I could charge my whiskey, and I had twenty bucks; breezed through the self check-out line, got gas and a couple of potato logs to eat on the way home (got the potato logs while the gas was pumping, which I thought was a splendid use of time). The folk origin of terms is always interesting, the borrow pit becomes the barrow pit when you haul out the dirt in a wheel-barrow. Hummocks often have trees, hammock is a dry-land feature, but it depends on where you live. I knew a guy who lived in those great salt-marshes between north Florida and south Georgia, and, to him, everything a few feet above the swamp was a tussock. A lovely word. I slept out with him a few times, running baited jugs, which is a kind of fishing where you chase plastic jugs around. Each one has a line attached, baited usually with chicken guts, and you're fishing for anything, actually, but large catfish are the cream of the crop. He and his wife ran a Fish-Hut off Route 17 in south Georgia, a very funky restaurant, bait shop, and boat launch, and they were lovely people. She made a superior turtle stew, used a hatchet like a Zen master. Marie was her name, Louisiana/French, he was nebulous, in terms of heritage, large, and either tanned or brown, I didn't care about that, he knew the waters. Hats off and all respect to anyone who recognizes the thicket in which they're entangled. I'm usually left scratching my head.