I could hear the cello playing in the foreground, slowly at first, a swipe or two across low bass strings with bow. 2 notes: duuu-duh. The waters surface rumpled from a tail wind cooling our backs, but I felt ill at ease in south Florida. The cello played its dirge again and I looked at my wife to see if she heard it. Freckles splashed by sunlight glowed warm on her unknowing face. Beads of sweat trickled down my forehead, steaming my sunglasses. Duuuh-duh. I pulled them down to the ridge of my nose, inquisitively, as the cello bow chugged trainlike across the strings, duuu-duh-duuuu-duh, sunlight gleamed from water and salt deposits on my black on black kayak, temporarily blinding me. A french horn joins in, dooooodle-doooh, as the musical assault on my subconcious become visible in murky, frothing, water cleaving at the razor edges of an oyster bar. Then, the fabled Quint of Amity shot through my head, slowly drawing long, gnarled, crooked fingers down the chalkboard: EEEEEEEUUUUGHHHeeeeeaaaaauuuugh! Slam! Grind! Stopped in complete, horrified, low tide silence, upended on an Everglades oyster bar. My wife curses and slashes wildly at the underwater predator to pristine hull finishes. I pry myself off the bar with my trusty Greenland Paddle, a tool unarguably superior to their lowly Euro counterparts for such an operation. I quietly held a disgust for 70's "Sha'k" movies and now the bar-on-hull sounds echo more familiarly of bus brakes in downtown Chicago. Upon my thorny retreat from the bar, I tug the Stern of her folding boat expecting a scene of WW2 U-boaters battling leaks made by depth charges. I envision us just 100 yards from Chockoloskee Island swinging on the valve like Gene Hackman did in the upside down world of Poseidon Adventure. We battled our nerves and landed on the midden in front of Smallwood's store to inspect damage. I layed her hull over, expecting that the folding boat belonging to this lovely woman would be horridly shredded. She stood there in the background under a mangrove tree chewing her power bar, holding it with 2 hands like a state park chipmunk holds a nut doled out by a generous camper. On the same stretch of beach where intemperate farmer EJ Watson was gunned down by a dozen or more vigilante/neighbors 90 years before, I was afraid she would have to walk the last 3 bloody miles back to Everglades City. But, as I layed that inferior folding hull, made with fabric inferior to gel coat, over I spied three scratches that would have been worse if my wife's chipmunk friends back at the park had made them. She cooly wiped her brow and looked seaward. My hull looked like a calcium war had raged upon her fine form. Quint's allies clearly won the chalkboard war as I duct taped a 3 inch gash down to the fiber. Landing at the City of Everglades we bagged our boats and set out for another kind of oyster bar. We shucked and slurped them with murderous glee as we knew their pals back in the swamp were related. I wanted to let one go free, just to spread the word at what was happening back at the Rod and Gun Club. I wanted to send them the bill that I knew my gel coat man back in Seattle would hand to me. But in the end I decided he could pay me the 75 bucks in Hell, as I slurped him down with all the others. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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