FOG BOUND
In times if discouragement, or in those vague moment when I am awakening from a deep sleep and seeking directions as to which way to turn to find complete consciousness, I am reminded of a time, years ago, when I was on Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. I was in a small boat veteran waterman Buzz Conway “helping” him check his crab traps spread out over Indian Creek inlet.
The fog had settled in thick about us on the shore jutting out into the water and I would not have been able to get anywhere without the guidance of a man who had lived and worked all his life - he and his brother Pat - who lived in a house perhaps a hundred yards down the pine-shrouded shoreline.
During the hour which followed I witnessed navigational expertize I would not have thought possible. He was seated in the stern of the boat at the tiller. I was seated on a board about midway in the craft. After pushing gently away from the wharf, Buzz kicked the motor to life and we slid off into the enveloping mist. Even the motors sound was muffled by the padded fullness of the fog.
I lost track of the number of stops we made.. We would be scurrying right along with that false sense of high speed I feel when skimming open water. Buzz would cut the motor Buzz would cut the motor cut the motor, and work his way forward a bit as the craft drifted and stopped at a spot where he would dredge up yet another cage.. We dumped the contents of each trap in the boat at our feet,closed the trap and lowered it with a sense of trap into the boat at our feet; closed the trapdoor and placed the crate-like cage it over the side to sink to the depths below ready for more blue crabs. Each trap,I felt, was carefully placed in the water - never thrown. There was solemnity about doing so. No doubt crab men have done it for generations, I think, as a physical expression of gratitude as well as a prayer for continued blessings in future catches.
The sun did poke through before we finished the round of trap sites, and the jelly fish patterns floating atop the water were an artistic display all their own. The pleasure schooner was still anchored in the channel where it had been the night before, but I had new knowledge of an unseen world of crabdom populating the bottom of the inlet which I had never known before.
Ashore, Buzz Conway schooled me in ways tell a perfect blue crab and I learned to select them from others and to place them in tank-trays he maintained for culling the take.. The less developed crabs were placed in other tanks and undesirable items bucketed to be returned to the Bay from the edge of the wharf.
Looking back on that morning spent with Buzz Conway, there on Indian Creek inlet just a few miles east of Kilmarnock,Virginia, tells me that to fully under stand a person you have to work with him or her as what seems to be a task to many but which is really a way of life and an enjoyable hobby-like activity one lives rather than does.
A.L.M. December 26, 2003 [c569wds]
