Shepherding Outdoors

SOMETHING’S FISHY

BY WALT MERRELL

“I’ll be home shortly,” I told Hannah, as I hung up the phone and walked into the courtroom. “I’m sorry, Judge,” I offered an apology for being tardy. He nodded his head, but his eyebrows remained furled… he expected some measure of an explanation. “Our freezer went out, and my wife was calling to let me know.” He relaxed his expression and then offered a few conciliatory remarks.

We spent the next hour taking testimony and presenting arguments about various pre-trial legal issues on a murder case. When I walked out of the stuffy confines of the South Alabama courtroom, I went straight to my truck. Stepping out into the fresh air of that fall afternoon, I could feel the rejuvenation of the crisp, cool temperature on my skin, and the bright sun bounced off the western horizon as it ran from the eastward moon. I climbed into the cab of my truck and threw my files and my suit coat into the passenger seat. That three-quarter-ton Dodge diesel growled to life, and, almost immediately, I could feel the stress of the job leave me… as if the truck itself was fueled by the tensions of the day. Rumbling down the road towards our small Loango, Alabama farm, I cherished the opportunity to leave work early… but dreaded the task that lay before me. Driving home, the roar of the mud tires and the rumble of the “needs to be repaved” road lulled me into thoughts of yesterday, bathed in anticipation of things to come.

My mind drifted…

We lived just an hour and a half or so from the Gulf of Mexico. I grew up in Baldwin County, and as a young buck, I spent a considerable amount of time in a 16-foot, wooden Stauter-Built (pronounced Stow-ter) boat, roaming the grass bed of Mobile Bay. That 35 horsepower Johnson never went anywhere fast, but it was always reliable… but as I aged, my childhood sufficiencies gave way to adult-like expectations, and that 35 Johnson wasn’t “enough.” For shame, too… that was a great boat. Jones-itis… that is the “itis” affliction of keeping up with the Joneses… took hold in my thirties, and I soon found myself the proud owner of a brand new 22-foot bay boat with a 200 horsepower Yamaha motor. For comparison’s sake, imagine the Stauter built as a mule and the bay boat as a racehorse.

But don’t ever forget… life is, oftentimes, a turtle’s race.

Within a week or two of buying this new boat, Hannah, Bay, Cape and myself drove to Mobile and set out to catch Redfish and Speckled Trout. We picked up my mother and her husband in Fairhope, and launched at the public ramp across at the end of Pier Street. The motor purred as the boat comfortably slid across the light chop of Mobile Bay. The salt tickled my nose, and the spray of the occasional bow break glistened my face. Middle Bay Lighthouse sat off the starboard bow as we cruised across the Bay, eager to fish the rock jetties around Gaillard Island. A bird sanctuary, it is known to locals by another name… not fit to print… think thousands of birds all standing in the same place day in and day out. Slowing to a drift near the northeast corner of the triangular shaped island, we found refuge on the leeward… calmer water that was a result of the island itself blocking the south wind. Just ahead, a school of juvenile mullet huddled close to the rocks, hoping to avoid detection from larger predators trolling just out of sight. In the deeper water, they made the perfect bait and in the shallows, they made the perfect target. One swing of the cast net landed us 11 healthy bite-sized baits for the Bull Red and Gator Trout we hoped to catch.

The small mullet flopped and flipped in the bottom of the live well. Their tail wags sounded like machine gun fire as they “flap, flap, flapp-ed” against the bottom of the live well basin. But slowly, the water filled in and their gasping gills, thirsty for air from the oxygen-rich waters, calmed. Soon enough, the soon-to-be hook holders settled in comfortably to their new environment. And though doom would be their fate… they seemed quite content that no larger predator lurked in the outskirts, waiting to gobble them up.

But the South wind grew stiffer, and, within an hour, the boat pitched and rolled uncomfortably. No fish and a lot of wind will shorten most every fishing trip, so we turned east and motored back to the launch. The inaugural fishing trip for my new boat wasn’t much of a success… seems big motors and fancy rigs don’t do much to overcome poor fishing skills and foul weather.

A week passed, and the boat sat idle in the yard. A heavy canvas cover protected it from rain and falling leaves, but that cover was burdensome, to say the least. Hopping out of my truck after a long day at the office, I pulled at the edges of the boat cover as I passed near… ensuring that the lines were all still taut. After my second, still in stride, tug at the cover, my nose caught a distinct odor. An odor I knew to be a sign of something ominous… that familiar smell of death and rotting decay. I stopped dead in my tracks… one hand still clutching the cover. Motionless, I attempted to get a more discerning sniff, and that’s when I heard a noticeable buzz… a droning sound, if you will… coming from underneath the cover of the boat.

I loosened one strap, and then another… the two of them side by side, and just far enough apart for a grown man to slide between. Lifting the cover for an inspection, the putrid smell of rotten fish overwhelmed me. I dryheaveda few times as I recoiled away from the boat. Saliva filled my mouth as I spat it away, trying desperately to rid my taste buds of the horrific encounter… and then it hit me: “I left those mullet in the live well.”

I’m fairly confident that the color left my face as I realized the droning buzz I heard was thousands of flies orbiting around under that boat cover. And soon enough, as I took one deep breath and reached into the live well, the contents of my stomach left as well.

“My Stauter-Bilt didn’t have a live well,” I thought to myself as I pulled the last hunk of rotten pudding from the live well. Seems the turtle was winning the race…

My recollections were interrupted by the realization that I was nearly home. The big diesel slowed to a near crawl as I waited for passing traffic so I could turn into the driveway… fully aware that my memories of rotten mullet brought on my realization that several hundred pounds of deer meat, beef, pork, fish and all sorts of vegetables, now lay in a rotten lump at the bottom of our freezer.

Earlier that day, Hannah told me enough to know that the situation was not good. Given the fact that when she cracked the lid, the smell nearly knocked her off the back porch… and that all she clearly saw in that brief moment, was larva… I knew enough to know that, based on her description, the mullet from the live well might as well have been in that chest freezer.

“I am going to see ifI can pick it up with the tractor,” Hannah told me earlier on the phone. “I am just going to haul it out into the middle of the pasture and leave it. We can clean it out, and leave the food for the buzzards and the coyotes.” It seemed a reasonable enough plan to me, though my court obligations kept me from discussing the details with her any further.

Coming into the driveway, my eyes drifted out into the pasture, where I spied that big white, chest freezer, semi-cocked on an angle like a ship listing as it sinks. The lid was open. A few items littered the grass around the freezer… the likes of which I couldn’t entirely discern… and there was no immediate sign of Hannah. Pulling past the house to my normal parking spot next to the playhouse, motion caught my eye. Turning to my right, looking through the glass of the passenger door, I saw my beloved bride running straight towards me.

She was running. She was nearly naked. A line of clothes dotted the pasture in a straight line behind her. And… she was running straight to me.

Now, Hannah is a free spirit. And, of course, I… being the 30-something-year-old rabbit with Jonesitis that I was… quickly deduced that freezer duty was going to have to wait. Because… there were clearly other, more important details that needed to be tended to.

Flinging her bra to the wind, she never broke stride… I quickly shed my tie and put all of my files back on the driver’s seat of the truck. “What passion this woman has,” I thought to myself, as I rounded the front of the truck to meet her. Holding up my arms and steadying myself to catch her… I knew this would surely be one of those sappy-love-embrace moments like you see in every Julia Roberts movie. Just as I turned to catch her, she veered slightly and ran right past me. “The Streak” was running so fast that the blow-by curled my hair as she passed.

“Fiiirrreee aaannntttttsssss…” She screamed as she went straight to the water hose in the back yard. I was still so caught up in the hopeful romanticism of it all that I simply stood there like an idiot… scratching my head, trying to figure out how I so terribly misunderstood the situation.

An hour passed, and she was fully dressed. We sat on the back porch in a swing, staring at the stillfull freezer in the pasture. Two deer crossed the field behind that big white box, cocked at one end by the kickstand of a fire ant bed that it was sitting on. I got up and pulled open the screen door to the kitchen… “Where are you going?” she asked. “Inside to unplug the refrigerator,” I responded. She cocked her head slightly to one side and stuck both her feet to the porch floor. The swing stopped abruptly. I knew the question was “why” even though she never uttered a word.

Before she could ask, I winked at her and said, “Cause I like it when I come home and find a naked woman running around in the pasture!”

Walt Merrell writes about life, family and faith. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, he enjoys time “in the woods or on the water” with his wife Hannah, and their three girls, Bay, Cape and Banks. They also manage an outdoors-based ministry called Shepherding Outdoors. Follow their adventures on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube at Shepherding Outdoors. You can email him at shepherdingoutdoors@gmail.com.