Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay: Helen Chappell

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay

by Helen Chappell

For as long as I can remember, and up to this very day, I’ve found great spiritual peace in watching water. The contemplation of that other world, both beautiful and unknown, has always intrigued me. If you want to meditate, lie face down on a dock and peer over the side into the other world below the surface.

After a while, you can enter a hypnotic state and have a natural history lesson at the same time. To peer into brackish water, like a creek or a river, is one meditation.

Another is to lie on a grass bank and observe the flora and fauna of a freshwater stream. Having a stick to poke at passing leaves and prod at crayfish is deeply satisfying, both for a child and for an adult showing a child how to pass some tradition along. A tradition that doesn’t involve video games and cheap plastic crap, I might add curmudgeonly.

There’s something to be said for the observation of water for

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no other reason than just looking.

A parent might say you could do something more useful, but what could be a better lesson in patience and observation than gazing into water? It teaches one to watch and observe.

When I was a kid, I liked lying flat on the dock with a piece of string and a looted strip of bacon. The world beneath those pilings on a warm summer day could be fascinating.

In spring, you could see the clear bottom, the little holes in the mud, the barnacles attached to the pilings that could cut you into shreds if you got too close to those sharp, dead shells.

The green shadows beneath the dock rolled and swelled, and the summer smell of creosote pilings and the slosh of water transported me to another world.

I’d drop the string overboard

near a piling and let it drift on the current. Sometimes a school of golden minnows, moving with one mind, would flash up to check it out, then flash away as fast as they’d come, disappearing into the murky darkness.

Every once in a while, a sunfish would come by and nibble at the bacon, then swim away in disgust. I guess the smoky taste was a turnoff.

Crabs would swim by, beautiful swimmers, quick as a magician’s trick. Sometimes, crabs preparing to molt would hang on to the pil-

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ings until it was time to move into the protection of the grass close to shore to grow a new shell.

They were just annoyed by a dangling bit of bacon teased in their direction. They’d half-heartedly wave a claw to dismiss it, the way you’d shoo away a fly.

Sometimes a passing crab would be attracted to the bit of bacon and stop to feed on it. Now, as is well known, crabs are scavengers and will eat anything, no matter how dead or decomposed, so a piece of raw bacon was a snack for them, like a deep-fried Snickers bar or a corn dog for a fairgoer. It was fun to watch them grab the bacon in their claws and bring it to their mouths to feed. What would make some crabs nibble up almost the whole strip, while others would check it out and swim away, I don’t know.

The innate cussedness of crabs is something I have heard experts, the watermen, discuss for hours.

Every once in a while, I’d get a strike from an eel. For some reason, eels love hanging around the pilings of a pier.

Whether it’s the shade or a food source or a place to hide from predators, I don’t know. But I bet you can find out on Wiki. I’m not fond of eels on any level.

Europeans consider them a delicacy, as do the Japanese, and

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Dock of the Bay ing the food chain along a little. Ah, nature, red in tooth and claw. Even so, just watching an eel swallow a strip of Oscar Mayer bacon whole, swimming away with your piece of twine, is annoying. The marsh grasses that grow along the shoreline have a whole biology of their own, too. When I was a kid, we used to have marsh hens or, as birders call them, Virginia rails nesting in there. Marsh there’s an eel harvest every spring hens are shy, so catching a glimpse in the Bay. The ones that don’t get of the female leading her babies eaten end up chopped, salted, tied along the shallows was a cause for to a trotline and used as crab bait. excitement.

The smell of rotted, salted eel is You had to be very still and not unbelievably rank, as are bull lips, make a sound or she’d herd her the other red meat, but we won’t go offspring into the deep marsh and there today. disappear. Now the only places I

Early on, I learned the reason hear the distinctive call of the rail you want to cast your line as far is on the long, marshy causeway away from a dock as you possibly out to Elliot’s Island. can is that the closer your hook We emerged from the water to lands to pilings, the more likely live on land, yet water still has an you’ll snag an eel on your line. atavistic power to draw us back,

Getting an eel off your line usu- at least to the thin edge between ally means losing your tackle. It’s solid ground and the flood. Maybe easier to cut off a hook and sinker in a million years or less, we’ll all and some line than try to get a be living back in the water again. wriggling, fighting slimy, slimy, slimy snakelike critter off your hook. Helen Chappell is the creator

More stubborn people will be- of the Sam and Hollis mystery sehead the creature and work with ries and the Oysterback stories, as that disgusting mouth. The prob- well as The Chesapeake Book of lem with that is you end up eyeball the Dead. Under her pen names, deep in blood and slime. Of course, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline the eel ends up as crab and fish Brooks, she has published a numfood anyway, so you’re just nudg- ber of historical novels. 22