A FLORIDA FAMILY'S PICNIC

CHAPTER XI

A FLORIDA FAMILY'S PICNIC

M R. MACK was the boss fisherman of the westScoast of Florida, with house and warehouses

in its chief city. His brand was knownthroughout the country and standardized the goodsit covered. The shanties resting on piles in theshallow bays and the palmetto shacks on the shoreof the coast were the quarters of his employees duringthe fishing season, where ice was kept, nets over-hauled and repaired and the men slept by day, forfishing with nets in that country is mostly night work.No union dictated the hours of labor, which, gov-erned by vagaries of fish and weather, were some-times twenty-four to the day and sometimes no hoursfor a week.

Fifty weeks in each year Mr. Mack devoted to hisbusiness, a fortnight belonged exclusively to hisfamily. When this playtime came, the best boat inhis fishing fleet, which had once been a famous yacht,was regularly house-cleaned and fitted up as a resi-dence. Each member of the household arranged hisown bunk and belongings and the forty years be-tween the oldest and the youngest melted away andfor the time they were all children together. Theysailed down the coast with no other crew than they

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Florida Enchantments

found in the family, for they were sailors and pilotsall, by an education that began generations beforethey were born.

The boat seemed to sail herself, the wheel rollingidly under the careless hand of a youth whose eyeswere inboard and his thoughts wandering, but shealways held true to her course. Sometimes a squabof a boy, three feet high, standing, with fat legs spreadwide and hands thrust deep in the pockets of hisbrief little breeches, would say: "That jib oughterbe trimmed in," and would waddle forward, bracehis little feet and tug at the sheet while his brother atthe wheel luffed up to help him. There was sky-larking all over the deck, but as the boat went about,somebody always happened to be standing by themainsheet, while one or two boys were jamming thejib to windward. As they neared a pass small headswould be cocked sideways as their owners scannedthe skies for a sight of the moon that they mightjudge if the tide would let them go through the swashchannel.

All nights and many days were spent in little baysor the mouths of rivers, from which the boys exploredin skiffs, crabbing in shallow waters, fishing underbanks and in the deeper channels, while the oldermembers of the family wandered along the outsidebeaches, watching the breaking waves and collectingshells of many hues and infinite variety, or gatheringcocoa plums and sea-grapes in the thickets behind thebeaches.

At Marco the grown-ups found friends to visit,152

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while the boys explored the cocoanut groves, climbedthe lofty palms like squirrels and sent a skiff loadof the great nuts tumbling to the ground. Of theirwisdom they chose the half-ripened nuts, the softflesh of which is like unto ice cream without the ice.They sat under tall trees of avocado pears until facesand hands were smeared with the luscious, yellow,cream-like substance of the fruit, and when theywent to their home on the boat, their pockets bulgedand their shirtwaists threatened to burst with theirloads of guavas and limes.

They patched up a net and rowed through the passto the outer beach in search of a mess of pompano,the choicest food fish of the South. Scanning thewater with judgment as mature as they themselveswere youthful, they selected a bit of the beach fortheir first trial, overhauled their net and stowed itin the skiff with all the skill of practiced fishermen.The fattest boy volunteered to act as anchor and sit-ting down in the surf held on to the staff at one endof the net, the second one rowed the skiff out fromthe shore and back, in a semi-circle, to the beach,while the third paid out the net as the skiff progressed.The ends of the net were then dragged up on thebeach and the boys, working from these ends to themiddle, hauled in the whole net, the leaden sinkerssliding along the sand and the cork floats holdingthe top of the net to the surface. When the net washalf on the beach there was commotion in the otherhalf in the water, some pompano dashed into themeshes and others leaped over the cork line, but

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Florida Enchantments

enough were caught for a picnic on shore. Broiledpompano was here supplemented by the boiled budof a young palmetto or cabbage tree, a vegetablewhich a Southern boy or a bear can extract in a fewminutes, while a Northerner, with axe reboundingfrom the elastic petioles of the big tough leaves whichsheathe the young tree, would sweat over the job foran hour.

One day while they were at Marco a sloop withsails en deshabille, propelled by a pole, bumped intothe piles and its owner crawled out on the dock withbruised and lacerated hands. Montgomery was anold blacksmith from some back country in the Northwhere he had never been exposed to seamanship, andhis account of his misfortunes gave the cruising boysfits. He told them he went out to try a boat he hadjust traded for and first ran into an oyster bed thathe couldn't see and then he tripped over the jib stringand fell on the tiller handle. When he got up, theboomstick swung across the boat and knocked himoverboard into the oyster bed. He explained that hewas cut up and badly bruised, but not beaten, andafter pushing his boat out into the channel had sailedout of the pass all right, but got into the surf outside,where the waves banged him on the bar and brokethe forks of his top boomstick and broke off the bottomboomstick halfway to the end, and then a piece gotloose and smashed the top-bottom of his boat. Theattempts of the boys to sympathize with the misfor-tunes of the narrator were painful. They reallywanted to be polite but their suppressed mirth struck

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A Florida Family's Picnic

in and affected them like the colic. They never fullyrecovered and as the cruise continued orders to"Leggo the string that's tied to that top-boomstick,"became so common that the father of the boys hadto issue an injunction against their use for the sakeof preserving the purity of the sea-grammar of thefamily.

At Caxambas the family found other friends,whose fields were filled with more than a million pine-apples, that is, when the cruisers landed, for whenthey left the number had been reduced. The boyswere amphibious, went overboard on the slightestprovocation and played together in the water likeyoung otters. They were proud of their proficiencyin water sports and as they ran out on the bow-sprit one day and diving deeply swam beneath thesurface across the wide channel and then played agame of leap-frog in the water, they succeeded inimpressing a youth who stood looking at them fromthe deck of a Northern boat which was tied to thewharf. He was a son of the owner of the boat and I,who happened to be looking on, was regretting that theharsher climate of his home had probably kept himfrom acquiring the skill of the boys he was watching,when he suddenly went below and quickly comingback in bathing trunks, ran fifty feet up the riggingto the cross-trees like a cat and dove far out into thestream. He swam swiftly back to his boat, scrambledup to the crosstrees and again sprang far out, thistime holding his body horizontally as he fell, untilnear the surface when he turned a quick somersault

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Florida Enchantments

and plunged headfirst deeply in the water. Whenhe came up this time, it was on the farther side of thepicnic boat, under which he had swam, and as hejoined the boys in their game I wasted no moresympathy on him for his lack of familiarity with thewater.

From Caxambas to Cape Sable is mostly clam bedand when it came to treading the raw material ofclam chowder out of the oozy mud with bare feet,even the women folks had to be counted in. In themouths of the rivers the boys could gather in a fewminutes from the trees more oysters than they couldeat in a week and a net set across any deep channelwas pretty sure of a four hundred-pound loggerheadturtle as soon as the tide turned and the net beganto "fish." Then, too, there was always the chance,if the place of setting the net was chosen with wis-dom, of the capture of a delicate, young, grass-fedgreen turtle, stuffed with soups, steaks and stews ofmatchless flavor. One evening they anchored justwithin the mouth of the beautiful Rodgers River andwatched the birds wading upon the shallow banks,and afterward flying to their near-by roosts, untilnight fell and then, as the boys listened to coonsquarreling on the oyster reefs, the occasional screamof a panther and the bellowing of big alligators,they planned for the next day an excursion by landand an exploration by water up the river. But inthe soft climate of South Florida days melt away, aball and chain wouldn't keep the hours in sight,and when the next morning came, Mr. Mack held

156

'Ran fifty feet up the rigging and dove far out into the stream.'-

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" This time holding his body horizontally."

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A Florida Family's Picnic

up his watch to his family and said: "Forty-eighthours more," the boys knew the time had beenstretched to the uttermost. A strong wind was blow-ing from their home two hundred miles away, andthey were in honor bound to be there in two days.

In five minutes the boat was close hauled on thefirst of a series of tacks that would continue nightand day up the coast until the anchor was droppedin the harbor of their home.

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