Robb White
Here’s an excerpt that I consider classic, worth the price of admission alone, from the chapter called “The Reynolds” on growing up along the Gulf Coast of Florida, where they had an old Reynolds aluminum rowboat…
The old Reynolds was only twelve feet long and built out of aluminum so thick that it might as well have been lead. It took us all to get it to the water, but then, after we clamped the motor on, like Where the Wild Things Are, the wild rumpus began. We were a hard-charging little crew. I was the oldest, so I was the boss. There were a variable number of my cousins, both boys and girls, some almost babies, and my two sisters and the girl (best friend of the oldest sister) who would wind up as my wife. Altogether, the whole bunch of children at the coasthouse averaged around seven or eight, and usually all of them wanted to go. As I said, we were not supervised by our parents at all–didn’t even have to come home for meals, but if we did, there it was, if we could find it. We were even exempt from evening muster and often stayed out all night rampaging up and down the wild shore in that old Reynolds. When we ran out of gas, we just rowed and towed. Five little boogers on the towline are just about equivalent to five horsepower–better than that in the shallow water of the flats around here.
It would be easy to pass judgment on our parents and say that they were negligent. Of course, memory is selective, but I can’t recall any time when we were in any more danger than if we had been “properly” supervised. Children who know that they are on their own are pretty cautious, and there were so many of us that the chance of a little one drowning, unnoticed, was pretty slim. Besides, around here, shallow water is more of a problem than deep. As they say, “On the flats, a man would have to dig a hole if he wanted to drown himself.” We were always so busy going where we needed to go that there was no fighting or meanness. All we wanted to do was to facilitate the progress. Those grown folks going on with their own doings weren’t negligent, not at all. You know, taking the whole summer off to go to the coast wasn’t all that unusual in the Deep South back before megalomania and AC. Corn has made roasting ears before June, so the farming is over until fall. Besides, the sweat doesn’t run into your eyes quite as bad down where the sea breeze blows. The grown people mostly stayed in the shade around the house but not us. We tried to wear out the water.
The whole Reynolds business took up several years and we all grew up while it happened. Little girls, the tops of their bathing suits hauled way down below their nipples (my skinny little wife-to-be, too) by the hard charging, had to change their ways. The intensity of our progress through the shallow water from one important destination to the other was such that the little ones usually wound up naked. There was one very persistent little fella. We tried to leave him at home because he was so slow, waddling along behind, but just about the time we would be getting in the boat, here he would come down the path from the house, hollering, “Wait the boat… Wait the boat.” When towing time came, he refused to be a non-participant and just ride in the boat. We dragged him while he held on to the painter, little naked body trailing along behind, diaper long gone, short legs working. We did that so much with that little boy that he had calluses on his hands before he was two, and because he always trailed along the same way on the towline, he was darker on one side than the other, kind of like a flounder. At least his bottom eye didn’t drift around to the dark side. He still lives around here. Says his whole life has gone downhill since those days.
As I said, these expeditions sometimes kept us away from the house for a long time. Though we always took, at my mother’s insistence, five whole gallons of ice water in an old galvanized cooler with a ceramic liner (a heavy thing), the food usually ran short. The deformities of our civilized tastes disappeared in the face of plain starvation. We squatted like varmints on oyster bars, silently at work with our screwdrivers. The kid with the bathing suit loved the little oyster crabs and ate them raw . . . just chewed them up whole, sand and all. We had to open oysters for the little naked ones, but they didn’t mind a little grit. We ate, immediately, every scallop we found–mantle, viscera, eyes, and all (to me, even now that my experience has broadened, there is no better snack). The whole time we were moving, we caught crabs and towed them along loose in the bottom of the boat, along with all the seashells that the little ones thought they had to take home (there is a modern “shell midden” where we dragged that old Reynolds up in the yard of that old house). When we got to a good stopping place, we would dip up some sea water in a foot tub, build a fire around it and boil all of those crabs. It was every man for himself when they got red. Sometimes, somebody nice like my wife-to-be would pick out some for the little naked ones, but usually, they did it for themselves. The little ones ate so much shell that their excrement looked about like that of coons or otters. One little four-toothed boy developed a strong liking for the contents of the crop and stomach of the crabs–called it “goody.” If I had known then what I know now, I probably would have stopped him. At least it didn’t hurt him in the long run, and who was I to decide what it takes to make the time that is the pinnacle of a man’s whole life?
