HOW DOLPHINS LEARNED A NEW WAY TO FISH (A LOW COUNTRY FABLE)

Tags

Dolphins, Fable, Low Country, Marsh Hen, Strand Feeding

I wish to acknowledge the wonderful Audubon paintings, which thankfully are in the public domain.

Harriet was a marsh hen. That is the common name, but in the books marsh hens are called clapper rails. The males in her family liked that because for them being called a marsh hen was embarrassing. You know how guys are. Rail sounded cooler, kind of macho. “Hi, I’m Fred, a rail, glad to meet cha.” As the name marsh hen implies, Harriet was about the size of a small chicken. She lived in the endless miles of salt water marshes on the coast of South Carolina, some bordering the numerous tidal creeks and rivers, others surrounding the non-beach sides of the many barrier islands. Harriet lived in the marshes between two islands, Edisto, a large island, and Botany, a much smaller island. She had a long, slim, downward curving beak, designed to winkle out small shrimp, crabs, and other yummy critters from the pluff mud. Pluff mud is the fluffy shoe-stealing sink-deep mud of salt water marshes. Oysters make their homes in it. I wonder if they live in the lost shoes.

Now Harriet had a special friend, Muriel, a sea turtle. One dark night Harriet had been sleeping in her bushy nest in the marsh just across a little tidal creek from the Botany Island beach, when she’d heard some strange grunting sounds. At first she’d thought maybe it was Alfred and Ida and their kids, the wild goat family that lived on the island, but it would have been unusual for them to wander the beach in the middle of the night. She went to the edge of the marshgrass and peered out. Huge sea turtles were lumbering out of the surf to lay their eggs in the sand. The nearest one, which turned out to be Muriel, had just dug a hole in the sand and settled in. Harriet waded across the creek to the beach and struck up a conversation. Marsh hens like chickens seldom fly, and never very high or far. So inbetween Muriel’s grunts they chatted away and became friends. They agreed that whenever her wanderings permitted, every full moon Muriel would come back to visit. Now Harriet had snapped up a baby turtle or two when they’d hatched and made their frantic scramble to the ocean, but she never ate one after she became friends with Muriel, a simple matter of courtesy.

On a night of the full moon Harriet went down to the beach to meet Muriel. Muriel hadn’t arrived yet, but there was something on the beach. It turned out to be Bill, a bottlenose dolphin, all wrapped up in a fishing net. The locals often called them porpoises, but bottlenose dolphin is the correct name. Bill preferred dolphin, but he wasn’t crazy about the bottlenose part. Anyway Bill had barely managed to save himself from drowning by beaching himself. The weight of the net and the fact that it limited his movements had made it more and more difficult for him to surface for air. The tide was going out, and when Harriet found him he was a good ways from the water. Bill was very weak from his struggles. Harriet immediately began to unravel the cords with her long beak. Harriet worked for an hour, maybe two, until she had unraveled a good bit of the net. Fortunately Muriel arrived just in time to tug the rest of it off of Bill and roll him down the sloped beach to the water. Bill just rested in the shallows a bit. Then when he felt strong enough, he thanked them and swam off.

About a week later as Bill swam down a tidal creek, he saw Harriet probing the pluff mud on the creek bank. At the same time he saw a school of small mullet swimming by her. On an impulse he swam quickly toward her and scared a couple fish into flipping up on the bank where Harriet ate them. He tried that again from time to time when he spotted Harriet, not always successfully because the fish didn’t always panic and flip themselves up on the bank, and it was hard for one dolphin to generate a big enough wave to wash them on shore. Also they weren’t always in the perfect spot. Still it was fun to try and Harriet appreciated the effort.

Then one day Bill was swimming with his cousins, Al and Edna, when he spotted Harriet. He talked his cousins into helping. There were no fish right in front of Harriet, but working together the three dolphins managed to herd a school of fish to the right place. Then they surged forward at the same time, creating a bow wave that washed a whole lot of fish up on the bank, many more than Harriet could eat. Al was hungry, so he flipped himself up on the mud bank and began munching away. Soon the other two dolphins joined him. With practice the dolphins became better and better at that style of fishing, whether Harriet was around or not. It became known as strand feeding, and for some years only South Carolina dolphins did it. Then some of Bill’s relatives visited, those odd Geechee dolphins from down Savannah way. Soon Georgia dolphins were doing it too. And if you ever visit Botany Island or Edisto or any of the other barrier islands in the South Carolina low country, you’ll have a good chance to see dolphins strand feeding. All thanks to the kindness of Harriet the marsh hen.

MY OWN LITTLE GHOST STORY

Tags

Ghosts, Nonfiction, South Carolina

My mother had a sixth grade education. She was a southern girl raised on a farm in the South Carolina low country. My Uncle George, her brother, died in The Battle of The Bulge. He was my grandmother’s youngest and the apple of her eye. My grandmother was dying from a brain tumor when my mother was pregnant with me, her first child. She told my mother that I was a boy and made her promise to name me George. Mom also said that my grandmother’s ghost visited her the night after she died.

Mom had many superstitions and odd beliefs. She believed that sea shells were bad luck, and that eating a banana after drinking a coke was certain death. Of course I tested that one out. I swear that she never had an inkling that there was anything sexual about this, but she believed the coachwhip snake, a long black snake, would hide in fields and wait for a woman to pass by. Then it would rise up, make a perfect construction worker like wolf whistle. When the woman looked at it, presumably a white woman, it would hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up to her, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

I have a brother one year younger and a much younger sister. Our parents loved us and sacrificed a great deal for us, but both were severely flawed, and the family unit deteriorated as the years went by. Mom suffered from ever worsening bipolar depression and dad had an ever worsening drinking problem. If anything mom was overprotective of us when we were young and her mental condition less pronounced. Dad was from Missouri, a child of the great depression, which intelligence aside limited a poor farm boy like him to an eighth grade education. He worked hard all his life at a dirty job, a welder in a naval shipyard. I liked the members of his Missouri family. However from age ten on we lived in the south, and mom’s family always seemed disdainful, almost hostile to us kids. I don’t think they cared for dad, and somehow that extended to us. Often my brother and I were treated like cheap labor. I was a bright kid with good grades, my brother valedictorian of his class, but my Greek uncle by marriage told us on several occasions that we should quit school and get a job washing dishes. When Uncle Jim lay dying, my brother and I had to sit death watch in the hospital in the wee hours.

Eventually our family disintegrated entirely when dad’s alcoholism finally cost him his job. My brother and I were in college, and due to scholarships, government loans and grants, and some work, we were able to get by on our own, if barely. My younger sister went to Missouri to live with her godparents, a wonderful childless couple who eventually adopted her. Perhaps the greatest thing my mother ever did for any of her children was befriend Lee and Nina back when we lived in Missouri and make them my sister’s godparents. I think they were the only non-related friends my parents ever had, and maintaining that friendship would have been impossible had we not moved away to South Carolina. Whether it was divine intervention or just lucky circumstance, I was grateful that she was taken care of. When things fell apart, mom followed my sister up there to Missouri. By that time her mental conditon had made her impossible to live with, and she would have fought institutionalization tooth and nail. Her family would have crucified us as well. As the oldest I experienced a great deal of guilt and anxiety about her, but there just wasn’t much I could do. I keep telling myself that.

A year or two later mom died. We brought the body back down to Charleston. I was working at the time, fresh out of college during a recession, just getting by. My brother stayed with me in a big house I shared with friends. My sister stayed with the family of another friend of mine. Mom’s family blamed us of course. I don’t think they ever acknowledged her mental condition. Even toward the end she could hold things together to some degree for an hour or two when a sister visited. Still it was there if you looked, but family doesn’t always look. I coordinated the arrangements with them but otherwise we didn’t have any face to face contact until the day of the funeral. My main concern was shielding my siblings as much as possible. As expected they were pretty cold toward us, barely civil, but we got through it.

That night I slept downstairs on the couch, having given my brother my room. I felt drained from the whole experience, sad but relieved that the ordeal was over. Sometime in the night I felt something land on my stomach. I sat up. I suspected that the cat had jumped down from the couch back, but I couldn’t find the cat. I went back to sleep. Sometime later I opened my eyes, and by the light from the street side window, I saw a key on a string twirling around above my head. I quickly closed my eyes. I told myself that understandably I had taken things harder than I thought. So I opened my eyes again and now the key was twirling faster and closer. I was scared. I closed my eyes. I took a few minutes to screw up my courage before I opened them again. Thank God the twirling key was gone. I sat up and took some deep breaths. I lay back down and had just closed my eyes, when I felt two hands touch me firmly three times top to bottom like a body search. At that point I jumped up and started yelling. Lights came on and people rushed down. I think all I said to them was that something strange was going on. That was the end of it. The next morning I noticed a key on a string hanging on the inside of the nearby window frame. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that it was all a dream due to extreme stress, combined with my childhood memories of mom’s superstitious tales. All I can say is that looking back I acted quite rationally in that dream, if indeed it was a dream.

THE WISE FROG DOESN’T PLAY IN HOT WATER

Tags

Africa, Cameroon, Chad, Humor, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, USAID

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chad working on a USAID funded project, I’d spent a good bit of time in the USAID office in N’Djamena. Also we mixed a lot socially. One of the senior USAID guys and maybe the best of the breed, Ed Costello, had been to my house for pig roasts, and I had been to his house to watch recordings of football games. So my interview with him near the end of my three years of service went smoothly. At the end he said that they probably had something for me lined up. He smiled, “But George, don’t go out and buy a cadillac yet.” So as soon as I was a free man again, I was hired on a short term personal services contract to figure out where the money they’d spent on a big multi-donor agriculture project had actually gone. Apparently they didn’t have a clue, or at least they pretended not to have one. I suspected that it was a bureaucratic hot potato thing. That project was a complicated mess and way too far gone to rectify. The folks back in Foggy Bottom must have demanded accountability or closure or something, and nobody wanted to have their names attached to that final ugly post-mortem report.

Since the project was potentially career tarnishing, the responsibility for supervising it had drifted down to the least common denominator, Stephen (don’t remember his real name). Stephen was the youngest and least experienced USAID direct hire employee in Chad. Let’s define that further to just one of the least experienced human beings anywhere period. He had spent some years as a monk in India (I think). I believe he even mentioned having taken a vow of silence for awhile. He was a likeable guy, academically smart, who exuded pleasantness and calmness and blissful ignorance about all things Chadian. Unfortunately he had become infamous in Foreign Service circles when he’d had some special honey shipped to him through the diplomatic pouch. A jar had broken, and from one stop to another the package had leaked the sticky stuff. Apparently the pouch had made several stops along the way to Chad, each one generating an angry cable. The ambassador was not amused. The point here is that sending Stephen up to the project site in remote Bol would have just been cruel. So they hired me, a rough and tumble well driller with language skills who knew his way around up there.

I spent a few weeks in the USAID office going over all the project files and learning to navigate my way through that bureaucratic sea. If that sounds like an exorbitant amount of time, then you have no idea how much paper a USAID project can generate in four years or so. USAID might be the preeminent bureaucracy in the entire US Government. If not it’s a contender. Until Jack Anderson wrote about it, they had an actual official job title: The Administrative Assistant to The Assistant Administrator for Administration, United States Agency for International Development. I mean when an agency’s “handbook” surpasses twenty-five volumes, that pretty much tells the story. We wells vols used to goof on USAID. When we wrote the subsequently approved two million dollar extension to our current project, we stated in it that once approved the first thing we needed to do was to go out and take a PISS (a pre-installation site survey).

A word about the Ag project. The polders are finger-shaped valleys at the edges of Lake Chad. Lake Chad has no observable outlets but it remains fresh water. It floods in the winter months when the accumulated water from earlier rains much farther south finally reach it via the Chari River. The river pours fresh water into the lake, and the higher salt content stagnent water is pushed to the fringes, flooding the polders. When the lake recedes again, shallow pools are left in the polders to evaporate during the dry season. There are also other ways the lake sheds salt, like natron formation and harvesting, that are not relevant here. Since the water table in the polders is near the surface, pumping up fresh water and flooding them to desalinate them if needed is not a big deal. Then build a little earthen damn across the usually narrow entrance to keep the lake from flooding it again, and you have a very fertile easily irrigated little valley. Traditionally when irrigation in Chad’s hot dry climate built the salt content of the soil back up, the locals would break down the damn and flood the polders again. The polders have been used for local agriculture for thousands of years, however up to that point never on a grand mechanized scale.

When that huge multi-donor project was conceived, in most years for a few months the open water reached Bol during the fall and winter, and then barges could navigate the lake and river between N’Djamena and Bol. So the idea was to grow wheat on a large scale and send it by barge down to N’Djamena to be processed and turned into delicious baguettes. Seemed like a great idea. Then the great Sahelian drought of the early to mid seventies hit just as the project was getting underway. The open water no longer came within miles of Bol, and never has since, even in wetter years. Lake Chad shrank. And tropical vegetation soon filled the void. Given the significant infrastructure investment and the lure of the fertile polders, they looked for solutions. For years at great effort and expense they kept a channel open through miles of vegetation, but the barge thing never panned out. So they decided to grow vegetables in the polders and ship them by truck over sand pistes (just tracks in the sand) and rough roads. Vegetables sold to expats at the project store in N’Djamena generated cash. Useful stuff cash.

In the beginning of Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra Expedition, he writes of his trip from N’Djamena to Bol to study the papyrus boats on Lake Chad as a great harrowing adventure, fraught with danger. I found his hyperbole amusing. At one point I almost fell out of my seat laughing as he described his acute anxiety at being surrounded by “swarthy bedouins.” He was talking about Kanembous. In N’Djamena the street vendors carrying bright colored towels and scarfs on their heads who insistently tried to sell you cigarettes and heart-shaped sunglasses were Kanembous. Also Kanembou ladies were renowned for friendliness. En brousse I found them to be generous, hospitable, and quick to laugh, but stubborn at times. Once a bunch of young Kanembou men piled into the bed of my pickup and refused to budge until I drove them to a not too distant village for a wedding. A fellow wells vol compared them to the Hekawi Indian tribe in the TV show F-Troop. Honestly I never for one moment felt threatened by Kanembous, annoyed at times, but never threatened. I’m sure they found me annoying at times too. Anyway a trip to Bol was just a day at the office for me, albeit a long dirty one. I must have made that trip thirty/forty times. Still and all, it was difficult enough that I knew it couldn’t make economic sense to ship perishable vegetables that way.

Other than some cement and construction materials which went into the project infrastructure in the early days, the USAID part of the project consisted of underwriting the costs of improving and maintaining roads in and around the polders. The Chadian governing agency, the World Bank and the UN were really the major players. So it was my job to find out if the USAID money had gone and was still going where it was supposed to go. USAID did ask me to try and find out exactly what their construction materials had been used for. However, short of any authority to access the files of the other project participants, that was a fool’s errand, water under the bridge, and I ignored it. Within two days up in Bol I had confirmed what I’d suspected from the files, that the USAID polder road maintenance funds were financing nearly all of the operating costs of transporting vegetables to N’Djamena by truck, including fuel, vehicle repairs, even driver salaries. I stayed up in Bol for two weeks anyway. I had friends up there, fresh vegetables aplenty, and as long as you had shelter from the mosquito swarms coming off the lake at night, Bol wasn’t a bad place. I was in no hurry, earning some real money was nice.

One of my friends, Mike Bouchard, was a PCV mechanic in Bol working on the ag project, and whatever else they asked him to do. He was the youngest vol in Chad, and very unusual for Peace Corps didn’t have a college degree. Apparently he had been in college and had been questioning if it was really the thing for him at that time, sitting around in a dorm with some buddies (maybe drinking, maybe stoned, I don’t remember him telling me that part), when they saw a Peace Corps recruiting ad on TV that enigmatically asked if the glass they were showing was half full or half empty, call this number to find out. He called. The recruiter never answered the question, but she did ask Mike if he had any skills. Mike figured that electric guitar probably didn’t count, so he answered with his other main skill. “Well, I’m a diesel mechanic.” There was a pause. “Hold on, let me get your information.”

Once during what passed for the rainy season up there, when Mike had been in Bol over a year, I stopped the landrover on top of a dune, and we looked out over an expanse of small dunes sparsely covered in light green cram cram grass. Cram cram is a burr grass, and where even cram cram no longer grows is considered by some botanists as the demarcation of the true desert. If we gazed at the most distant dunes, they appeared to be totally covered in a light green fuzz, but closer you could clearly see the sand beneath. Mike turned to me: “It kind of reminds me of the Shenandoah Valley.” After I took that in, I replied, “You know Mike, perhaps you should consider going home for a visit.”

Mike worked with David Girven, one of the true Chad legends. David had been a Chad vol back in the early days when Peace Corps did fun things, like teach new vols the wrong language and dump them without a structured job in isolated villages. Psychovacs were not uncommon in those days. David had stayed on in Chad working for the Chadian Government agency running the ag project as a mechanic. He fixed everything that needed fixing, and invented things like a plowing shield to put on the bow of the boat that cleared the papyrus blocking the channel to open water. He had a Chadian family, lived in a humble mud brick compound, and was bigger than life, a Chadian Jeremiah Johnson, liked and respected by Chadians all over that region. He was a humble, compassionate, and generous man.

Since a good portion of Bol used our wells, we vols were up there fairly frequently. Many a night we’d camped out in David’s compound, huddled under our mosquito nets. You didn’t walk around much in Bol at night. The massed whining of mosquitos coming in off the lake at sunset compared to a big jet preparing for takeoff. One night David stood outside the nets and held out his bare arm until no skin was visible, just mosquitos. David was not loquacious by nature, but it was a real treat when we could coax one of the old stories out of him.

So after a couple of weeks I went back to N’Djamena, spent another couple weeks in the USAID office slugging through the bureaucracy, and then turned in my final report. I was still being paid to hang around while people digested my report, in case they had any questions. The initial reactions had been favorable, and I had hopes USAID would find something else for me to do. At that moment all hell broke loose in N’Djamena. It was a civil war, fighting in the streets, a total breakdown in order. Leaving the war stories to be told separately, after several days when the fighting had diminished enough to risk it, I made my way out to the airport. All non-essential personnel were being evacuated to Yaounde, Cameroon, and from there to the states. Baggage was limited to two suitcases per person. Apparently some of the “essential” personnel decided that my language and practical skills could come in handy, so I was asked to stay on and help with logistics, first and foremost the loose packing of abandoned homes. I accepted.