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one more story I don't want to forget
Jun. 16th, 2019 09:45 pmThis week just past, the week between the two semesters of my jail job, we visited the Robert E. Barrett fishway again, to show the healing angel the fish elevator, and this year there was a marvelous docent there, Walter, a retired professor who grew up around here and leapt and jumped his way from rock to rock across the shallows below the dam when he was young.
He told the story of fishing for a lemon shark when he was a young man--he had wanted the jaw of the shark as a souvenir. But when he did finally catch a lemon shark, it was so beautiful that he was ashamed of having wanted to display its jaw, and he let it go. Then, some years later, he was snorkeling in the Caribbean, swimming near a pod of dolphins who suddenly took off when he got near. He returned to the boat only to be told that a giant shark had been dogging him--but not attacking him, he felt, because he had let the lemon shark go.
He loves fish, you could tell. It was mainly lampreys and shad being transported in the elevator that day (see murky pictures below), and he had a phone video of a lamprey that attached itself hopefully to the glass wall of the elevator, revealing its terrifying mouth--like the sandworm mouth on some paperback editions of Dune.
I was happy to meet and talk with him.
lampreys
shad
He told the story of fishing for a lemon shark when he was a young man--he had wanted the jaw of the shark as a souvenir. But when he did finally catch a lemon shark, it was so beautiful that he was ashamed of having wanted to display its jaw, and he let it go. Then, some years later, he was snorkeling in the Caribbean, swimming near a pod of dolphins who suddenly took off when he got near. He returned to the boat only to be told that a giant shark had been dogging him--but not attacking him, he felt, because he had let the lemon shark go.
He loves fish, you could tell. It was mainly lampreys and shad being transported in the elevator that day (see murky pictures below), and he had a phone video of a lamprey that attached itself hopefully to the glass wall of the elevator, revealing its terrifying mouth--like the sandworm mouth on some paperback editions of Dune.
I was happy to meet and talk with him.
lampreys
shad
