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Bradley Jergins: Nice catch
By BRADLEY JERGINS
Published June 27, 2005
Here's another of our favorite submissions to our Summer Essay Contest, in which we asked readers to tell about a memorable day at the beach in 300 words. We'll continue to publish an essay a day through July 4.
- JOHN BARRY, Deputy Floridian Editor
* * *
He stood chest-high in the dark water beyond the foam. I remember him there, moored in the ocean, his cigarette glowing and fading like a beacon in the scant daylight. We were terrified of him. Not just at that moment, as from the shore we watched the stroke of his rod send the ballast far into the deep, but always we were afraid of our grandfather. He did not speak to children.
That day he wore the waders my brother and I had previously seen hanging from a nail behind an iron gate in his carport. During long summers the carport, a white-washed, slatted outbuilding into whose recesses the sunlight never stretched far enough for our curiosity, held a certain mystical attraction for us. It was, like our grandfather, filled with shadowed spaces.
But earlier that morning the lock had clanked and the gate had whined as he opened them. We had walked into a vault heavy with the smell of petroleum and dust. Then by halogen flicker my brother and I had seen fishing nets with long wooden handles, lures tacked by hooks in rows across the shelf edges, rode strung from cross beams. In the hours before sunrise, we had gathered the tackle and propped the rods against the Oldsmobile's chrome bumper. On the road to the coast I had fallen asleep.
From where he now stood in the water, he called for us to bring the nets. My brother and I scrambled in fear. Our grandfather's body lurched and trembled as he came to shore, marking our position, drawing ever closer to us, his rod bending beneath the weight of his catch.
While we stood and admired the trophy, our grandfather turned to us and smiled.
"It's a beautiful fish, boys," he said.
Bradley Jergins lives in Brooksville.
[Last modified June 24, 2005, 09:40:04]
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