Days of Uncle Ernest - Chesapeake City and the World – Maggie, Chapter 2

Days of Uncle Ernest -

Chesapeake City and the World – Maggie, Chapter 2

As Uncle Ernest disappeared into the house, letting the screen door slam behind him as usual, I swung our porch swing a little harder and thought about how much I loved to fish. Only a few years in the future, Nina, would find me hooking school to fish all day off one of the barges that moored in the canal Basin.

My Pal Junior tied his small rowboat at Borger’s wharf, and I would borrow it to paddle out, tie her off, and climb aboard the broad, rust-covered deck of the barge. I’d laugh under my breath at the poor saps—my schoolmates—sitting in class on such a beautiful day. And yet, I was always a little afraid of being caught by old man Barnes, the dreaded truant officer.

Every year I would rush the season, starting on the first warm day in March. Later in the spring I would catch some nice pan-sized yellow neds, sunnies, and catfish, but in the cold waters of early March I usually caught shiners or eels. The shiners would nibble ever so gently, and when I managed to hook one and reel him in, I enjoyed it as much as if he had been a two-foot rock. Pulling one in was magical, Nina, because he would flash out of the water, silver in the sun, and I would reel him to my hand and close my fingers on a three-inch living creature, vigorously flipping, spinning, and fluttering, showing just how much he wanted to live and return to his familiar life below. Carefully extracting the hook from the fragile, gasping mouth, I noticed that I could see right through his body as his gills opened and closed, seeking oxygen. Darting out of my hand to freedom, and flitting back and forth almost subliminally before diving to dark comfort below, he left part of himself with me—a few silver scales and the (not unpleasant) ripe odor of fish.

The eels, though, were something else—disgusting, slimy tanglers of lines that left my hands so encrusted with slime that water and rags wouldn’t ever remove. Angrily, I would swing those eels overhead several times, smashing them on the steel deck, sometimes losing my hook and sinker in the process.

But fishing and crabbing was a Godsend for me during those unbearably slow-moving days of summer. A certain morning, when I was eleven or twelve, stands out clearly in my mind. My buddy, Joey Hotra, and I rode our bikes down Chestnut Spring Road to an area he knew about along a wider section of Back Creek.

We rode through a fairly extensive wooded area, navigated around the stumps and fallen branches, laid our bikes in the grass at the edge of the woods, and stood looking out across the long shore at the shimmering, motionless river. A small, rickety wharf stood high in the distance, a ghostly silhouette in the eerie silence. Except for low, jagged stumps punctuating the shore at low tide (I'll show them to you sometime, Nina), the wharf has long since disintegrated. But in my mind it's still erected there, a black outline against the hushed morning river.

It was very early, just at dawn, and as we walked through the murky sand and sloshed up to the wharf, I felt as if I had just entered an enchanted land. Everything was dead-still all around. The dim gleam of daybreak, a gentle nightlight, was on the water, so unlike the light bulb that soon would glare. I looked back at the shore where we had been; it seemed a long way off. I looked again across the water to the other side of the river—not the slightest current. It was dead-low tide.

I reached over and felt the piling where it met the water and part of it crumbled wet in my hand. I reached down and washed it off but its odor of decaying, saturated wood lingered. A muted echo sounded from across the water … and then again, silence. But soon, standing motionless, I heard the murmurings of tiny shore creatures, uttering evidence of their existence in the new day. Strange, that the scene—that moment of glory before sunrise—is still mysteriously powerful, just as it was when it stunned a skinny boy in 1947.

The water around the wharf was only a foot deep, but we threw in our crabbing lines and waded out waist-deep to cast out our fishing lines. Later, when the sun came out and the tide started coming in, the spell was broken, but we fished, crabbed, and swam till suppertime just the same.

Nina, can you remember certain events crystal-clear like that? What makes our minds seize certain seemingly unimportant happenings and implant them into prominent areas of our brains, allowing us to re-experience those events as though they had just occurred? But such thoughts never entered my mind, swinging alone there so many years ago. Then Uncle Ernest plopped down beside me and continued his strange tale.

[To be continued Friday, 9/21/2012]