Tuesday, February 20, 2007
A few months ago, I went home for Christmas. Dad’s shoulder was still too weak to paddle in a canoe, so we decided to take the flatboat down to the marshes to fish. The boat sits in the alley next to our house on a trailer under a blanket of foliage. A Chinese Elm leans crookedly across the alley on that side of the house, dropping its scaly bark in the wind like a leper while acorns from the neighbors’ oak rattle in the boat’s metal hull. We took an hour to clean out the boat, only to find that the motor was busted. Because Dad lost the key to the lock that secures the motor the stern, the boat spent a weekend at the shop while we watched the skies with hopes that good weather might come again soon.
Two days before I was scheduled to leave, Dad ignored the dubious forecast and stated that ‘it’s now or never’. We got up at 4 the next morning, rigged the boat to the car and headed out on the 39 eastwards as the sky brightened slowly into a cold blue glow. Storm clouds chased us out of town, through the 9th ward and past Jackson Barracks, through Arabi and towards the shattered fishing towns and suburban outposts that dotted the highway. With the car heater on in the dark, I slept fitfully, opening my eyes to catch my father’s face painted in the thin green light of the dashboard. His lips were moving silently, and I went back to sleep imagining that he was telling himself a story.
We reached Violet as the sun was creeping weakly from behind the clouds, glinting off the rooftops and outriggers of the fishing boats nestled along the canal. Dad told me that towns like Violet are outside the protection of the primary levee system, and are sheltered from the elements only by a series of earthen ridges called backlevees that rise in the distance ahead of Lake Borgne to the northeast. These ridges held back some of the storm surge when Katrina came through, but water still came right up the canal and overtopped the walls, burying the houses and cars and shops in brackish black water from the gulf. Greasy tide-marks still ring the oak trees standing along the roadside, and most of the buildings sag on titled foundations, their windows boarded and their guts rusting in the front yards. My father hands me his coffee and says it only gets worse from here.The motor died twice on the way out from the launch. My dad sat at the bow by the fishing gear, his face serene as I fidgeted with the choke and throttle, cursing. I couldn’t see the tiny jet of water that normally spouts from a hole in the back of the motor when it’s running, which meant water wasn’t cycling through the engine. After talking about our options, we decided to cross the main channel and fish the inlets on the far side while staying in view of passing boats in case the motor quit completely. I was uncomfortable with the possibility of being stranded, which had happened before. This part of the world is bleak, just grass and water, with the skeletal pilings of old docks and fishing camps dotting the landscape like graves. We idled into a little bay where the surface of the water was calm, sheltered from the wind by the tall marsh grasses that grew along the bank. Clouds of bugs drifted in this eddy, but we dropped our lines and cinched our hoods around our faces, watching the water.
Want an orange Dad asked me, and I shook my head. He set his fishing rod down against the rim of the boat and leaned back against the lifejackets, peeling the orange with a few quick motions. His fingers moved like a piano player’s, deft and nonchalant. The sky stayed bright gray above us, darkening out towards the gulf in menacing swells along the horizon. The wind tore across the water, and my dad closed his eyes. It’s absolutely beautiful out here he said, perhaps to himself.
The only thing we caught that day out in the marsh was our boat. After floating for hours at the mouths of inlets, we decided to pull the boat onto the bank and wander on foot in the hopes of finding better spots. The shore itself was just tall, stiff grass, strong with a paper shell that it shed like a snake as it jabbed our legs and cracked beneath our feet. The shore was also mud. It was a rich, black soil that sucked at our shoes and sometimes yielded to our weight so that we’d sink suddenly up to the knees, laughing. Dad went his way and I fished near the boat, eating a sandwich and unconsciously beginning to manifest the signs of fisherman’s defeat by sitting down and holding the fishing rod between my knees. Clouds tumbled overhead.
After a while, I heard a motor rumble by in the distance, and stood up to see a small trawler chugging up the canal towards the launch. I turned my attention back to my bobber in the water, which was doing nothing, until I heard a soft rushing noise as the wake kicked up along the shore, curling along the grass to meet me. At this point, the surge of water lifted the boat up off the grass, and in one moment it was floating out into the channel. My dad, who was making his way back through the grass, shouted YOU BETTER GET THAT FUCKER and without thinking I plunged in after the boat. The muck at the shoreline held on to my legs, and for a moment I went completely underwater, caught in the bottom and flailing to get myself free. I managed, and swam after the boat, which was spinning in the wind and headed for open water. Between the noise of the wind and water in my ears, I could hear Dad shouting from the shore, but I wasn’t able to climb into the boat. Eventually, after a lot of cursing, I pulled it in.
With the boat retrieved, my dad set about tearing up stalks of grass with a knife and carving out a space for me to sit down. I stripped out of my wet gear and hovered next to him in the wind as he tore up newspaper and started a small fire. The grass was wet, producing a thick white smoke that stung my eyes but kept the bugs away, and I stood in my underwear over the fire, dripping while dad laughed and joked and congratulated me on my swim.
I hope we don’t catch a thing today he said, his bronzed skin crinkling around his face as he grinned, as if we’d resigned ourselves to let this be the one thing worth retelling to Mom and Cyp when we got home.