The Linville River Gorge

I can't imagine someone not seeing in technicolor. I always have, that's why. If I didn't see in technicolor I couldn't imagine what people saw that could. I don't know what difference it could make one way or the other. My younger brother is color blind. I don't know which colors it is that he can't see. I do know that he says whatever it is forces him to become an expert in recognizing shapes. He finds arrowheads and other grounded things that other people ignore and step over. He sees the shape, and normal visioned folk mostly recognize color to distinguish nay-me-d (named) thangs.

One of the other thangs I can't imagine is not being able to sit here in my room and re-member myself in all the places I've ever been in the world. I've seen two right good-sized river gorges by foot. The Grand Canyon one out West where it's high and dry, and Linville Gorge right here in the mountains of North Carolina. They're both gorges, but there is a world of difference in the sight of them. I leave my body here and go back to visit frequently. I'm surround by folk my age here that never been nowhere. Don't seem to have harmed them at all. They got the same stuff they started out with, and not having nothing more than that never caused a ruckus.

I went to Linville Gorge while it was still in private ownership with my first father-in-law. I never knew the second one. He worked for the man who owned it. Big textile magnate back in the day when textiles was North Carolina's second biggest money-maker. They sold all those textile factories they could to China. Lock, stock, and barrel. Then, they criminalized the use of tobacco, which was the first money-maker in the state. I honestly don't know what people do for money around here any more, but there's more of them than ever, so I guess they're getting by.

I'm shocked at the new features of The Dictionary that comes with the Mac. I just now highlighted the words "Linville Gorge", then right-clicked the highlighted words. The dialog box that popped out gave me a choice of checking out the words on Google or opening the Dictionary. I opened the Dictionary. In the dialog box that follow the program automatically looked up "Linville Gorge" in Wikipedia, and there it was with a picture to boot. In every Mac program I used. Even when I'm typing in the browser, the spellchecker is right there with the Dictionary too.

The ease with which this happens IS shocking to me. I have a perfectly good unabridged dictionary sitting right here beside my desk not three feet away, and I haven't used it since I switched back to using Macs. They're just designed for creative people and all their whimsical little needs. A lot of what amazes me about the Mac rig I'm using has to do with the Internet. They're so interconnected now.

What happened is a perfect example of what I'm writing about. I'm sitting here wasting time enow by writing stuff to try to capture drifting thoughts. I remember Linville Gorge and the fishing trip I was taken as a guest on to the Linville River. I'm sitting here on the coastal plains remembering how astounded I was that fish could even live in the shallow little creek, and I was catching catfish left and right. CATFISH! Up in the freaking mountains!

We needed to catch them left and right. When we dressed them out and fried them for supper it took five or six of those fish to make us feel like we even eaten anything. Them ol' boys was having a hell of a time thinking they wuz eating some sho' nuff fish, when just one of the catfish from around here would have feed all of them without all the fuss and fritter.

I think them catfish up in Linville Gorge are a different species than the ones we catch down here in the swamps of the Atlantic Ocean coastal plains. There are catfish caught in the Cape Fear River not thirty miles from here that weigh over two hundred pounds. The Cape Fear is a major river. It literally runs deep and wide, and them big cats grow in all the big rivers around the Southeastern United States. I don't know about up north and out in California.

I do know about some little catfish that grow out in the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico, because sorting the shrimp we dragged up there was made tedious by those little catfish. They had long sharp fins on the backs and were about 3-4 inches long. That would be the adult version. I never saw none bigger than that. Don't quote me, they could be bigger, but, I remember them suckers for the pain they caused me.

We'd be grabbing those shrimp we had poured on the deck (along with everything else that fell outta the draw net), and sorting them by size in an assortment of plastic tubs to market later. That was my job as a deck hand. We usually worked as fast as we could to get done before we hauled the nets up again. Everything that gets done on a shrimp boat gets done between when they haul in the nets. Eating, sleeping, and jacking yo' jaws.

The problem with the Gulf Coast catfish was that if you weren't careful to avoid them that spine might stick into your hands, and they has something poisonous on them, and that longish spine might stick slam through your fingers or your hand, and it really, really hurt! Not only that, but you wouldn't get over it by the time you did it again. Well, at least for a beginner it was usually that way, and even the experienced people would reach for the wrong thing occasionally.

That's what I'm talking about. What the hell do you do if you ain't ever done much but the same thing over and over... until you're too pooped to pop... and you lay down to die? What? You never worked on a shrimp boat off Louisiana and Texas for Cajun people you couldn't possibly understand until your hands swolled up as big as ham? No wonder you have to play golf until you drop.