you remember and save to dream about when you are old. It was completely peaceful and cool that morning. We didn't intend to go...we just ended up at the Crabshack and Granny says "get Odie and get in the boat." I had the dog and the camera, and the camera had unlimited charge and storage.
My mother's grandfather George Sewell fished with his son-in-law, Everett Reahard, at what now would be early in the last century. Everett and his wife Mary Jane fished together during and after the Great Depression. He fished with his sons before, during, and after WWII and again when they brought their young wives to live on the bay. Later, his daughter Sug fished with her son Michael Ormston, and now he with his teenaged sons, Ethan and Aaron.
All have fought to maintain the freedom to fish the backwaters of the bay on the Gulf of Mexico at Bonita Springs. They all worked to provide food and cash for their families. A livelihood. An industry.
Ethan and Aaron are the 5th generation of a family...working out of that place...to keep head above water, to keep life above poverty level. In calm or storm, heat or cold, night or day, all have fished the same waters that we know from memory. Literally like the veins on the back of our hands we know these waters. And while we have all changed or disappeared, the waters remain the same.
This is a sentimental tale. Beautiful in its simplicity and fierce in its truths. Carmen is The Fishslayer. The only time she is truly happy is when she is fishing. It is a freedom she chose for herself.
We tucked into this little no-exit eddy and saw the water alive with fish. This was on Saturday, a day the law forbids commercial fishermen to work. I saw her fingers twitch. I saw her scan and calculate. I felt an excitement growing, with a familiarity I quietly savored. I said "you're going to tell me to throw the let-go, aren't you?" After a minute she replied that I couldn't throw it (it was a rusty, ten pound sledge hammer head). She slipped the engine into reverse and backed slowly to the western shore. Then she said "let it go." The pictures from there are self-explanatory.
The treasure of this series is the concentration as she pulls in the net. As she shucks the fish I am lying on the dock, talking and asking questions. Deftly, she pulls the fish by the head and pushes them by the body out of her net.
I had the chance to observe her religion. It was something I will never forget, and something I never want to forget. Because as I lay on that dock clicking and filming I was aware of all the ghosts of long ago, sitting in the same position: backs bent, hands working, minds free. A subtle calculation of profit versus loss, an unconscious decision how the product would serve.
The blood and the slime...
V-shaped mouths gasping for oxygen...
The black dark stare of dead eyes...
pennies, nickles, quarters, halves and silver dollars...
All of this as familiar as the waterways...
the veins and capillaries that beat blood throughout our peculiar bodies...
A stench of satisfaction filled the air.
