Picking Nets
I had an uncle who was a commercial fisherman, working in the north Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia. When I was a boy, my family occasionally made the long drive from Michigan to visit on summer vacation. A child of the Midwest, I was far more familiar with woods and fields than the seashore, and I found the life there fascinating. Lapping waves, salt air, tides going in and out, foghorns moaning invisibly through the morning, jellyfish washing up on the rocks: nothing like that ever happened in the world I came from! The sights, sounds, and smells of the seacoast were utterly foreign to me, and I tagged along with my older cousin for hours to see what life was like for a fisherman's son. It was a wonderful adventure when my dad, older brother, and I got to go out on my uncle's fishing boat for a day, watching them cast nets and haul in fish.
The less-adventurous part of the visit was helping my older cousin pick nets. After a day of fishing, the huge nets would be covered with seaweed and lumps of other ocean gunk, and when they'd dried a bit in the sun, my cousin had the unpleasant job of picking the nets clean. Sitting out on the wharf in the hot sun with a pile of smelly nets, picking rotting seaweed from them by hand, was every bit as pleasant as you might imagine. But at age five or six, curious about everything and eager to earn a little pocket change, I sat and helped, growing absorbed in the task until I realized Tommy had wandered away and left me to finish the job alone. I hadn't yet read Tom Sawyer, but a few years later I understood that I had been bamboozled into whitewashing the fence.
That's all more than sixty years in the past now, but when I saw this spider web—a net splayed out to catch a harvest of insects—with bits of leaf and twig caught up in it, the memory of picking nets, sitting cross-legged on my uncle's wharf, came over me, and I could swear I heard a foghorn.