This Month's Story

Remember this? It’s July 2004

It’s the 4th of July; that bright hiatus at the start of summer’s broad span of days. This particular day is crisp and sparkling clear with light, cooling showers moving in gray sporadic mists of opaque rain over the Sound.

Stella and I are on the end of Waveland’s fishing pier. There are about twelve or so hardened fishermen around us, ignoring the brief sprinkles of rain, each working his/hers limit of two poles and the conversation is fishing. Stella has borrowed a pole from one of the men and is busy casting out her line.

For such a determined group, they’re not doing well.

As a result of the recent heavy rains, the water is barely brackish and the catch at pier’s end is catfish, rays, undersize specs, and every so often, a small shark. But to the group, all this doesn’t matter, every hit produces the same excited rushing about, of reeling in, of avoiding other lines, and finally, the grabbing of the net to pull whatever is being caught up to the high deck of the pier for all to see.

Stella has caught two hardheads and, undaunted, is working her borrowed pole, casting, reeling in, feeling her line. I watch her. She’s having a good time. I keep myself several feet away, staying out of the action, talking to an old oil field hand who is willing to chat with me between his own more leisurely casts about the old days on the rigs, about mud men, pipe stands and doodle bugging.

Anything but fishing, I think, and I watch and listen and hang on to his every word.

“Bubba, you got one!”

Bubba, a boy about twelve, maybe thirteen, barefoot, large hands and vivid black curly hair, grabs the vibrating pole he’d left resting against the rail and dancing back, yanks hard. The hook sinks in; he has his fish. More reeling in, excitement.

Someone yells, “Another shark.”

I can’t help it, the excitement is pervasive, and I stand up to watch as the boy lands a small shark, and another boy, the same age, measures it, - thirty four inches, not a keeper - and, deftly unhooking it, Bubba throws it back in.

Finally, Stella becomes tired of catching hardheads and returns her borrowed pole. Gathering me up with a contented smile, we walk the long way back down the pier to my pickup and we head home, me driving with her talking about fishing and then shifting her talk slightly to speak about the newly repaired and extended pier that has become Waveland’s pride and joy.

The renovated pier is not officially open as yet, we could see work still waiting to be done as we walked the long walk to the pickup, but when it all gets done, probably by the first or second week of August, she plans to get a season ticket.

“Too bad about Bubba, though” she says looking back toward the long pier where she left him. “He’ll only be able to come out on weekends.”

I look back at the pier in the rear view mirror. More rain is coming, a large dark, brooding mass moving slowly, ponderously from the west; it will hit the pier and the fishermen soon.

“Why is that?”

“School. His school starts the end of this month.” She’s waving a finger now, thinking. “No, that’s not right. I think it starts the eight of August or something like that. But anyway, he won’t be fishing much longer.”

“What? “ I forget about the pier and the approaching rain and turn to her. “August!

“Paul, come on,” Stella’s exasperated by my ignorance. “All the schools around here start the first week or second of August. You know that!”

“No. No, I didn’t.” I’m flabbergasted and stare at the road ahead of us. “Why are they doing that? It doesn’t make sense. How long has this been going on?”

***

Later I sit on the porch, watching rain squalls move in front going from west to east across the water. They’re much heavier than the misty, brief showers we saw earlier.

The Waveland Pier a mile or so in the distance to our west vanishes momentarily in the diffused gray haze of a swift moving squall. One moment it was there, albeit hazy, and then it was gone. The squall itself moving toward us. I’m sure with all this, the fishermen have long since quit for the day. The uncaught catfish, rays, and sharks are safe for another day.

Watching this broad show of sweeping rain and muted thunder moving across the Sound, I think that for all its bluster and noise, it is all a late spring effort, that from this point on, summer, real summer, really starts; stretching in time far ahead across a long hazy distance of July and August with their hot, bright days.

Against all this, I try to digest what Stella has told me about Bubba. School in August! It all seems unreal, unnatural. My ideas of summer vacations are dated, left over from my years ago experience with school.

I remembered that way back then we got off about a week before Memorial Day and we went back to school the week after Labor Day. That gave us three months of … of … well, whatever we wanted to do. What a wonderful gift those three months were!

Summer jobs, camps, family vacations or just sitting around watching golden day follow golden day. Usually a little of each of the first few, but lots and lots of the last. We all have memories of our days in school, but think of all the vast richer memories of our days of summer.

Our summers in those long ago days were not structured, we were wasting time, time that by the reasoning of any rational thinking person, could be better spent in planned lessons, in controlled environments, doing the logical things, the needed things, the things that went with producing a person ready to enter the real world.

Maybe.

But then there’s Bubba. What class would teach him to do what he did today, what class would have him work so hard for a catch that he and everyone standing there with him knew would be thrown back in as soon as it was landed.

Logic is what we were taught by our teachers, our parents. Yet, as we grow older, we see the world around us is really aligned with something different, that there are times when it seems that all creation is really a decoupled series of times of endless chaos.

The summers we had long ago, those “wasted” summers, prepared us for the real world’s warped logic, the real world’s misshapen structure of existence. A world in which a wasted moment at the right time is actually the very essence of joy itself. The wasted moment that, when viewed against the vast endless panorama of existence, is the real purpose of it all.

I’m not sure who it was that made the rule that school vacation should come to an end in August. I am sure that when whoever they were, put down a list of positive and negative factors of logical choices, learning time, school equipment usage, teacher output, the gradual elimination of summer became the best of logical choices.

But I do know that there are things that will eventually be irretrievably lost.

Like Bubba’s excited dance as he sunk the hook on his catch on the 4th of July on the newly extended Waveland Municipal Pier.