Local walks: Ralston District
October 1, 2005•
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In good weather, we enlarge ourselves in perambulation. Walking is healthful, slow, determined, invigorating and instructive. When we walk vigorously, we recharge our circulatory faculties and enjoy a lively pulse. At slower paces, it is our minds that race ahead, taking in the countryside in ways that are impossible from a moving car. I have found that walking with a cigar can be particularly salubrious.
It was in just such a mood that I recently set out from Gladstone to walk to Union Schoolhouse in Mendham’s Ralston District. Savoring a bright afternoon, it seemed reasonable to meet the Raritan River at Union Schoolhouse, then follow it up to where it emerges from the Roxiticus Valley beneath Schiff Preserve. From there, it seemed an easy circuit home along Roxiticus Road where the valley views open up below Chester’s hills and Peapack Brook winds gently down into Gladstone.
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Pishwaugh and the Prizefighter
March 30, 2005•
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My unfinished 2004 short story, Pishwaugh and the Prize Fighter, needs some love. Here’s a taste, mostly to remind myself to pick up the thread and actually take these characters somewhere.
* * *
In a little while, O’Malley came back into the bar and took a stool. “It’s all fixed,” the little man said.
“What’s fixed?” Pish replied, regarding him carefully.
“The match. I’ve got it all worked out. ”
The barkeep caught Pish’s eye and, with a nod, set two fresh glasses on the bar. Pish raised his and in a movement, emptied it, eyes damp. O’Malley made a small noise above his whisky, cupping the glass with two hands in the manner of someone warding off chill. The extra exertion seemed to work, as in a moment he brightened visibly and said “Farth round. He’ll take a knee.”
Pish considered this news for a moment and thought that the odds were only slightly better. “Will he come out punching?” he asked.
The little man appeared perplexed. “He’s his father’s son, now isn’t he?”
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Pugilists in Pluffmud
June 1, 2000•
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In those days, if you braved quicksand, feral boars and rattlesnakes and arrived at Fripp Island’s westernmost edge, you would be rewarded with privacy, quiet fishing and the best sunsets north of Harbor Town. For ten long summers, I clung to that dock as my fortress of solitude and learned to live in rhythm with its tides.
On Fripp Island South Carolina, where I spent the best part of my boyhood and adolescence, there is a small dock on the island’s westernmost promontory that stands above a tidal estuary known as Old House Creek. A decade ago, this dock was rebuilt to accommodate the aesthetic preferences of a bustling real estate trade, but in the mid-60’s, it reflected that haphazard manner of construction familiar to watermen up and down the Carolina coast. That is to say, its pilings were hewn from the rough trunks of palmetto trees that were set into the alluvial mud of the creek bed amid oyster rakes and wading birds, then framed out in railroad cross-ties. True to the style, this structure was planked in a millrun of ancient cypress and daubed with creosote that, when heated under the bright lowcountry sun, spread to impart a rich mahogany stain. Atop each palmetto piling—installed inverted with the skinny-end down—a cap of galvanized tin was fastened as a kind of barrier against rot. These made comfortable stools from which to fish on all but the hottest days. By long custom, handrails were assumed superfluous, but mooring cleats sufficient to secure a fully laden shrimp boat in a gale were not, and it was likely that more than one trawler captain penciled the place into his charts. Where the dock joined the shore, its builders furnished a narrow apron of crushed oyster shells to stabilize the bank and buffer the structure from brushfires, but in all other respects they left it to weather the years untended. And until the site was selected for a small-boat marina and commercial hub, untended it was.
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Seining the Tide
April 20, 2000•
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Shortly after he retired from the Coast Guard and returned to the Carolina Lowcountry, my brother challenged me to recollect a long-ago fishing story involving our Dad, the Prince of Tides. Nothing very difficult about that, I replied, and offered up the following tale…
* * *
Okay, Michael, I’ll take your challenge!
For me, the most memorable moment on the water with Dad didn’t happen in the Lowcountry at all, but it might easily have happened there as we repeated it often over the years at Fripp Island. There’s something unforgettable about a “first time” for anything, and the first time Dad took me out to seine a beach still plays vividly in my imagination. I was probably nine or ten at the time. We lived in Kingsland on the old Brazell place east of town. One summer night in—call it 1964—Dad hauled Danny and me out of bed and loaded us into his truck. It must have been three o’clock in the morning, pitch black outside, and we could tell he’d already been up for a while, maybe even all night. He tossed some rubber wading boots and a couple of #10 galvanized washtubs in the back, then piled on a couple of fishing rods in that haphazard, matter-of-fact way he abuses tools and equipment. We had no idea what he had in mind yet, and woke up quickly as he turned the truck south down Route 17 toward the state line. As early sleepers, nighttime travel was still a novelty to Danny and me and we were suddenly very alert at the possibilities, trying to divine Dad’s plan before he spilled it. I remember seeing Kingsland’s only traffic light blinking red in all directions, and it suddenly seemed very liberating to know that we were the only vehicle on the road at that hour. “I’ll bet you could run that light if you wanted to, Daddy.” And he did, letting us know that he felt it too.
Just outside of town, we stopped at Steffans’, ablaze with light and the parked reflections of two or three other pickups and a deputy’s patrol car. “Let’s eat, boys,” Dad said. Inside, Charlie Brazell was waiting for us along with one or two others—I think it might have been Rabbit Bruce and J.W. Mills, but I can’t say now if this is an accurate recollection or just what my heart says would have been right. We slid into a booth and while Danny and I fiddled with the little jukebox at the table, Dad ordered eggs, bacon, grits and toast all around. When the waitress returned, he pulled a huge thermos bottle from somewhere beneath the table and asked her to fill it with coffee, saying “It’s going to be a long night.”
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