Slim: Hey -- want to go fishing Sunday?
Me: Sure, where?
Slim: in the ocean. In Pacifica.
Me: Really? OK.
Sunday morning we get up and go over the hill to Pacifica and rent a sixteen foot outboard rowboat and they launch (drop) us off a steep, long ramp made out of telephone poles and we paddle through the breakers, drop the outboard, and poof -- we're in the Pacific in a 16' wood (freakin) outboard rowboat. Fishing for Ling-Cod.
"Just point right at the beach and the waves will take you home -- and {stay to the left of) try to miss the rocks and you'll be ok ... pull the motor up at the last minute ..." I can remember the shoreline from the ocean as if it were yesterday, but the odds of finding it from the beach side today are impossible.
I was sixteen, and Slim was about sixty-nine and my neighbor. I never was scared, and I never felt in danger. I never caught a fish, and I never was seasick. Slim threatened to throw his teeth up over the gunwale and told a shark story or two ... "The shark bit at the back end of the boat and left a bunch of teeth in it -- see -- here's a few," and he holds out a fistful of shark's teeth tied together with a string. If he were here today, I'd get in that boat with him again.
Holy crap. I wish I had taken a camera. You can't imagine the feeling of being on the very edge of the world, beyond the edge of the world -- and out there in the water. Looking back at the land with childish wonder. Holy crap. I wish I had taken a camera. I think it was here where the pillars are in the water.
And, damn, I won that camera the year before at the county fair, by shooting little targets with serious deadly accuracy, or some other crazy game.
3 comments:
Zoiks! So, was that your first camera?
In my family we had an original Polaroid land camera and one of these, both of which I still have. I shot photos with the ansco on a trip we made to Mexico when I was 8. I think I once shot an oat meal box pinhole camera in the seventh grade. We also had a super 8 movie camera, which we could occasionally shoot a roll of film with.
I won a plastic 35mm camera sometime around my being 10 years old at the county fair. It worked well for a long time, and it's inevitable fate was to be lost. It was my first camera.
When my brother returned from Vietnam he had a Pentax K1000 which he would let me use. Now that was a camera.
Very, very cool. My mom recently gave her first camera, a brownie, I believe, to the daughter of a good friend AND taught her to use it. Lovely when these things are passed along.
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