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West By Northwest.org Sunnyside of Spencer Butte The Cat That Flew
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The talk about sauerkraut and generations has brought
to mind an experience from my girlhood which I hereby share with you, kind readers.
In the early thirties my family spent several winters sharecropping in the Florida
Everglades, in an effort to earn cash for payments on an Ohio farm. Our home there
was a small frame house twenty miles south of Miami in a truck gardening area east
of the Key West highway. Several square miles of rich black soil had been drained
by canals which empties into the Bay of Biscay two miles away. These canals, about
twenty feet wide by ten feet deep, carried fresh water which the incoming tide backed
up to eight feet deep twice daily. Moss grew luxuriantly in the fresh warm water,
making good cover for fish, alligators, water moccasins and other aquatic life.
Great schools of fish called silver mullet came up the canal by our house with the
tide to feed on the moss. One of our pastimes was trying to count how many fish there
were in a school in that sparklingly clear water. Our estimates went to several hundred.
Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon we walked to the Bay where we could see a dozen schools
at a time jumping in silvery flowing cascades across the water for half a mile or
more. They were so plentiful we thought they could never be used up.
But even then, forty years ago, environmentally conscious Floridians had passed some
protective laws. One such law made it illegal to kill mullet by exploding dynamite
in the water among them. Nevertheless, we frequently heard an explosion at daylight
down near the Bay where poachers DID dynamite fish for fertilizer. An explosion would
often yield a truckload of fish which were gathered from the surface where they floated,
and hauled to the fertilizer factory before law-enforcement officers were up and
about.
The mullet were twelve to twenty inches long, and delicious eating, but they would
not bite a hook. The local people showed us how to spear them with a gig attached
to a bamboo pole, and we had fresh fish on our table almost every day thereafter.
Dad often went fishing while Mother fixed breakfast. He would hold his spear in the
midst of a feeding school of fish. They soon became accustomed to it and would swim
calmly over, under, or past the tip as they fed. A quick thrust could impale one
on the barbed points as it went by.
Most of us caught fish this way one time or another. We had to learn to judge location
of spear and fish because the pole always looked bent at the point where it entered
the water. What a thrill to spear one of those beauties and lift it squirming from
the water. The pole quivered till it seemed it would jump out of one's hands, and
the fish were unbelievably heavy way out there at the end of that ten foot bamboo
handle.
I often got the job of cleaning the fish Dad speared. They had to be scaled then
beheaded and gutted. Our family cat loved fish, and would wait impatiently for her
share. In fact she only waited because she couldn't help herself since I was bigger
and kept pushing her away.
One evening she was particularly insistent. I pushed. I scatted her. I used my foot,
but kitty was hungry and came back each time trying to make off with the fish before
I could scrape another scale. Finally, in exasperation, I grabbed her tail and flung
her across country about twenty feet. Preparing, as a cat will, to land feet first,
she spread all four legs wide as she whirled end for end past the open kitchen door
where she landed on the walk just beyond.
I heard Grandmother chuckling in the kitchen as the surprised cat took her bearings
and headed for the fish-cleaning scene again. Still chuckling, Grandmother stuck
her head around the corner and said, "That's the first time I ever saw a cat
fly!"
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Some of Lois Barton's West By Northwest On the Sunnyside of Spencer Butte articles and/or check the Archives for more:
Sauerkraut and All That
Charlotte's Overdose - Just who is Charlotte and what did she take?
The Midwife - The midnight call awoke an unusual midwife.
The Mystery of Fox Hollow - Fact and fiction meet in this story of the origins of Faith Rock.
Trees, Tame Trees and Squirrel.
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Books by Lois Barton
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