The Autumnal Horn

October 9, 2018 - 1:44am - by Linn Barnes

After all we've seen and heard these past days, 

tomorrow we will sound the autumnal horn, 

we will flee to the sanctuary of the deep woods, 

where only the here and now rings true and clear,  

where the light is sharp, where the wind cuts clean, 

straight to the 'deep heart's core',  

where hope takes a long happy breath, 

flooding life to the wounded soul.

Pure Evil

October 7, 2018 - 6:49pm - by Linn Barnes

Pure Evil

-Linn Barnes

Pure, radiant, seething, glowering, demonic, 

autocratic, narcissistic, ruthless Evil

has gained another foothold in the land. 

Another chip has been hacked from 

the torn fabric of justice and reason.

Listen to the rant: ‘The Mob’, he screams,

‘the mob is upon the land, beware, save your 

sons, husbands and fathers from the marauding 

lying women and rabid democrat anarchists 

disguised as innocent protestors!’

An ancient trick, well worn and slicked up,

hoping to stop what’s coming in November,

meat to the vicious right wing goons, clumsy, 

lumbering, laughing cadres of sycophants,

in step, proud and victorious, gleefully

celebrating their insane wish for the end of the 

holy experiment that was once called

America. 

After Kavanaugh

October 6, 2018 - 5:09pm - by Linn Barnes

What are the possible solutions in light of what has transpired? I'm beginning to think it is going to require something akin to well conceived long term operations against the 'problem', activity that is inclusive of the many like minded, somehow organized for effectiveness... Am I describing a fully functional political party? i think so. The 'knack' for focused and dedicated political operations against what has become a malignancy in the country (we should stop using 'our': it's such a sop) is imperative and will require the collective strong will of a large percentage of individuals with fire in their guts. November could be a birthing. I have a sense that by then the outrage will have flourished and found direction and will. Of course, this is what the right has been up to for a very long and effective time. Learn from them, and turn on them the fury of the righteous! The Kavanaugh debacle is fully beyond the pale and should be met with power and determination.

Atonement

October 6, 2018 - 1:02pm - by Linn Barnes

I was raised Catholic, and although I am no longer actively part of the church, the basic dogma has never left me. People joke about 'Catholic Guilt' and rightly so, but it is real. What it means, or, implies, is not complicated or esoteric. When you are raised 'Catholic', as in most of the world's great religions, you are instilled with a 'working moral compass', a ground-in set of do's and don't's that stays with you for life. At least that's the idea. Of course, the Church (God) provides sanctions and housing for the most egregious of sinners in someplace called 'hell', but also relief for repentant sinners and a means to seek forgiveness called 'confession', which, if you really mean it, can get you back on the straight and narrow with a clean slate. Sins are categorized from 'venial'. everyday smaller transgressions, to the much more serious 'mortal' sins, like rape, murder, etc.. With all this in mind, Brett Kavanaugh is a conundrum. How could he have led the life he describes and still maintain his profound devotion? All I can assume is that he must have kept the confessional seat plenty warm for a very long time. And, in particular, 'thou shalt not lie', and if you do, you must confess and redeem yourself, or, you will suffer dire 'consequences.' He lied openly and repeatedly in front of the entire known universe. He has made no attempt to atone for what we all witnessed. The assault on Dr Ford in their teen years is, in spite of her eloquent testimony, unfortunately, more difficult to 'prove'. I choose to believe her, but I cannot prove it. Whether I need to prove it is another question altogether. The other accusations are equally difficult, so I suppose only his Father Confessor will know, maybe, since there is every reason to believe he is a 'selective confessor'. I met Chief Justice Roberts, a devout Catholic, after a concert Allison and I gave some years ago. While our politics may differ, he is a calm and brilliant man. He has demonstrated this all of his life. Brett Kavanaugh is not this man. His path is in every way suspect. That should be enough to disqualify him, but, apparently for the Republican majority he gets a pass. Where are the sins at this point? I think they are certainly heaped in spades on Kavanaugh, but they also must be counted among the cynicism and hypocrisy of the ruling majority. Can sins be collective? Yes, I think we can say there have been historical instances of 'collective sinning' by certain nation states for instance. However, I think the culpability, in this case, rests with the individuals who must choose to endorse Kavanaugh's appointment or reject it, the supposedly responsible members of our Congress. Where shall they go to atone for this appointment and upon whose ears shall their confessions fall, if at all...

Birthing the Blues

September 26, 2018 - 6:51pm - by Linn Barnes

Birthing the Blues

-Linn Barnes 

The way to figure out what any group is doing is by watching them when they’re not paying attention to your watching them.  Simple.  It figures the next question would be something like, and where might that be?  Well, at the beach, if you were sixteen or seventeen, that would be the cocktail party, the cocktail party of the late 50s, that unique gathering of loosened up adults who under normal circumstances would shy away from certain subjects, like sex, state of any x’s or y’s marriage, religion, politics and certainly anything to do with race and race relations.  This was a world where colored people were not much more than an abstraction, and certainly nothing that could in any way have anything to do with your life, except perhaps the maid or entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, etc…  Kids, young people, are more open to assaulting the taboos and at that point me and my guitar playing pals were moving on from the commercial style of folk music, the Kingston Trio and the like, to something a lot more profound and frankly intimidating, even dangerous, to the parental order:  The blues.  Me, Johnny Kerkam, Toby Thompson, Cotton Havell, Jake Mills and Randy Mason and others were all blues nuts.  Why?  Well, it’s not hard to understand.  The black players we all admired were really great guitar players and singers, impassioned guitar players and singers. We had given up listening to or imitating the commercial stuff in favor of literally the darker side of things.  The blues songs were dangerous and unusual with titles like, ‘Please See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, ‘Hootchie Kootchie Man’, ‘I’m a Back Door Man’, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, ‘Cocaine Blues’, ‘You Got To Bottle Up And Go’, ‘Keep on Truckin’ Mama’, stuff like that.  They’re  were no more ‘I Gave My Love A Cherry’, or, ‘The Fox’ type tunes in sight.  Furthermore, the more we played this music and the better we got at it, the more curious and drawn into black culture we became.  Now, this  was alright with the parental minions, but where could it go, they must have been asking themselves, although I really don’t think any of them thought very much about it at all.  Blues was, in a word, about as hip a form of guitar playing and singing you could ever find, anywhere.  And we were eating it up, practicing like crazy, competing with each other and, miracle of miracles, it was a great way to impress the girls, which probably was at the heart of the matter.  Isn’t it always?

Well, at one of these cocktail parties, while exercising my developing tradecraft, I overheard something that really fired me up.  A small group of adults were quietly talking about how they would sneak their cabin cruisers up on a negro resort on the of back of Indian River Inlet bay behind Bethany, called Rosedale, anchor off shore and listen to some of the most incredible music they had ever heard.  I mean, they described going with many friends, in many boats, bringing tons of drink, food, the works. Oh, it was a grand and safe party from a grand and safe perch to observe the ‘natives’ at play…I guess it was a little like ‘going up to Harlem’ back in the 20s and 30s.  Great names were there, but they apparently had no idea what they were hearing, just that it was very good, and, perhaps, even better, very outlandish and daring.  If they had tried to go ashore, things might not have gone well for  them.  They almost certainly would not have been welcomed by a society of people they had not welcomed for hundreds of years.  At least they seemed to know that.  I began to seriously think about this mysterious place they were describing.  Wasn’t there a line in an old blues, ‘going down to Rosedale, where I can have some fun.. drink white lightnin’, gamble, ‘till my baby come..’ Well, once I had told the guitar gang about this fortuitous glimmer of intel, we all became determined to find a way to get to this mythical place. 

There was this other guy, a real character, about as wild and free spirited as they get.  His name was Billy Farnsworth and he and his family lived on the same street as Ned and Nancy Chaucer.  His family, like the Chaucer’s, were also very wealthy, and they, like the Chaucer’s, were ‘old money’, the charm of being charmed by it long gotten used to and now pretty much ignored.  Billy  was not a guitar player, but he liked all of us who worked at it, and he recognized that by hanging around with us he could cash in on the girl thing we were attracting with this risky new music we were playing.  He understood correctly that he could be part of this new thing called ‘hip’.  And, Billy was really a very cool and funny character who managed to keep us fairly drunk on his ‘BF Specials’, a nasty devil of a drink he conjured up which was three parts rum to one part vodka, maybe more, and a dash of lemonade to sooth your conscience, all of which he would make by the gallon and bring to the beach, beach parties, house parties, he always seemed to have  a stash of the stuff.  And, he was funny as hell, with apparently not a care in the world.  The Farnsworth place was one of the great houses at the beach.  They had a large yard to manage and, it seems now, many automobiles to tend to.  They also had a full time chauffeur, grounds keeper, butler, I guess, who managed the whole deal for them.  This was very old school, but nobody gave it a second thought.  It just was.  This man’s name was Parker, just Parker.  I never heard anybody refer to him any other way.  Anyway, Parker was an elegant black man, obviously educated and very well spoken, who took a shinning to all the young white kids, and, especially we guitar players, we blues buffs.  He was friendly and often drew us into discussions about this music we were playing so enthusiastically.  We noticed right away that he had a tremendous amount of information about the players we were trying to imitate and the songs themselves.  So, Parker became  a kind of mentor to all of us.  It took a long time for him to finally let us know that at one time he had been a major figure in the production and management of important black entertainers and that to this day he was highly respected in the black music world.  This man was simply amazing, and, of course, the Farnsworth's, mom and dad,  had not the faintest glimmer of an idea who he really was, which I think was just fine with him.  But, he recognized and perhaps was amused that we young white kids had a real interest in black music and, therefore, black culture, which in 1959, was just about unheard of…  When we finally got up the nerve to ask him about Rosedale, he was very straightforward and forth coming explaining to all of us what an amazing place for black people it was.  He told us it was part of a network of black clubs and resorts jokingly referred to as the ‘Chitlin Circuit’, and that some of the greatest names in music often played there.  People like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Sam Cooke, and many other luminaries among the black and white audiences.  He told us many of the younger black performers on the national stage also came to Rosedale, but for some reason he refused to identify them, and he did so with an obviously sly grin, which we were unable to decipher at the time.  But he did very carefully explain why Rosedale existed, and that, of course, was the pervasive segregation of the races throughout the country.  He embarrassed all of us with his clear articulation of a social problem so profoundly ugly and sad that our parents never even brought the subject up.  Our parents were not racists per se, at least most of them weren’t, but they were more than a little guilty of ducking the issue, thinking, I suppose,  that it would somehow take care of itself.  Progress was being made, my father would often say, referring to the Brown vs Board of Education decision of 1954.  When I countered with how could lynching still be occurring in the south, and that southern prisons were no better than Nazi concentration camps, things tended to get ugly, not because he disagreed with me, but because he felt the same way, and just couldn’t see any quick solution.  He would usually say something like ‘well, it will take time…’.   Parker, and most of the intellectual black world had other ideas, and they were on the way, he frequently hinted to us…  Change was indeed in the air and a lot of it had to do with popular culture, and, especially, music.  The roots of change were intimately bound up in the changes in attitudes brought in part by popular music.  Things were in flux in the white world.  The beatniks were beginning to be taken seriously, and it looked like music, especially the blues, was going to have a profound effect at many levels of popular white music and culture.  For example, it was finally becoming common knowledge that Elvis Presley had found fame and fortune playing black music.  Parker was able to  hint  obliquely at many of these ideas without alarming anyone, but the seeds were sown in our bunch, and, I think he was enormously influential on my own education about the tragic state of race relations in the United States. 

One day in August of ’59 Neddie Chaucer and I were hanging out at Billy Farnsworth’s place.  We were clowning around as usual, more or less on our way to the beach to meet our pal, Patty Noble, a really cute and fun girl about a year younger than me and Neddie.  Everyone was in love with Patty at various degrees, but pretty much to no avail, except maybe for Johnny Kerkam, who we all suspected she really loved, but all the girls, it seemed, were in love with Johnny.  Johnny, apart from being an incredible athlete, was a great guitar and harmonica player in the tradition of Sonny Terry, the great black blues harp player.  He was also a great singer and showman and knew an incredible batch of songs, really weird and little known stuff.  He was a couple of years older than me, Neddie and Toby, but we were all on the same blues boat.  Anyway, Parker was working on one of the cars in the garage, when he came over to chat with us for a minute, as he always did.  But, then he proposed something that stopped us in our tracks.  He said he knew of a great musician who was coming to Rosedale that coming weekend, and, would we like to go as his guests?  He wouldn’t tell us who the musician was, but assured us we would know who he was, and we would not be disappointed.  I think we collectively said something like ‘wow’ and ‘yes’ and ‘thank you Parker’, all bundled up together… Saturday was two days away, and all we had to do was convince our parents that this adventure under the ‘protection’ of Parker was safe and sane.  Surprisingly, our parents thought it was a ‘grand’ idea, but with the usual warnings attached.  Parker told us to put together a group of our friends we thought would enjoy some really great music and fun in a very different world.  He told us he would drive and we would take the limousine, and that he had already cleared everything with Billy’s dad.  Well, we raced up to the beach and told Patty, who was wildly up for it.  Next we told Neddie’s sister Nancy and her friend Joannie Heron, a really sharp girl and friend to all of us and another of our guitar gang, Cotton Havell.  I called Toby Thompson and Johnny Kerkam and told them about it and they all jumped at the chance.  We all did, and we couldn’t believe our luck and Parker’s incredible generosity. 

Of course, Saturday took forever getting there, but finally we were on our way, about a forty-five minute drive inland and back down to the bay and the Rosedale resort.  Billy had a jug of BF specials and we were all getting oiled but, but cautiously, and, carefully watched by Parker, who was all of a sudden a very different man, totally in control of us and the situation in general.  We arrived at Rosedale at about four in the afternoon.  Things were in full swing on a beautiful sunny day and everyone seemed intent on the entertainment that was scheduled, although nobody would tell any of us who it was.  Parker had been busy…  He introduced us to several people we all assumed were the management and things were going very well.  Parker then took us into the concert hall and we were shown to a backstage area and nearly fell flat on our faces.  Sitting at a piano  warming up was none other than Ray Charles, the great Ray Charles.  Parker introduced all of us and we meekly shook hands with him and tried to overcome the shock of being in his basically royal presence.  Ray got up from the piano and asked us if we could give him a hand.  We all said sure, anything.  He said some of his regular crew were off chasing the ladies and certainly far into the booze and he needed some help getting the piano out on the stage, and would we give him a hand.  Well, I can’t tell you how fast we shouted out a ringing something like god, yes, but was probably more of a yes, sir, Mr Charles.  Parker was all grins and we all took up positions on the grand piano and wrestled it out onto the stage.  The hall was beginning to fill up and many of the patrons, all black, not a white face among them, laughed at what they saw and gave us all a rousing and friendly cheer.  Once we had the piano in place we fled backstage again, while Ray was getting tuned up for the show.  Pretty soon the hall was jammed and Ray’s lead man took him out to the piano and the wildly applauding full house.  Without a nod or a blink, he broke into ‘Tell me What I Say’, and things went crazy.  Never had I imagined the full impact of huge talent and stardom.  It was magic, hypnotic and surreal.  Ray Charles, in front of his own people, kicked out all the jams and practically levitated the entire building.  The audience was deafening when he finished and dead quiet on the slower and introspective numbers.  God, what a showman.  I think for all of us, players and non players, things were forever changed.  To describe it as a religious experience is close but really not good enough.  This was a man doing exactly what he was born to do for an enormous group of people born to see and hear him do just that.

The concert was amazing and after a while many people were out of their seats and dancing anyplace they could.  Some of the young black guys came over to us and asked ‘our’ girls to dance, which was all very polite, fun and not in the least bit threatening.  It was really fun, the whole deal, but, by the end of the show everybody was pretty near plastered, and Parker decided, quite correctly, I’m sure, to pull the plug, load us all up in the limo and head back to Bethany.  It had been a day like no other, one I will never forget and always cherish.  The whole experience actually gave me a new, powerful and optimistic vision for the future of race relations in very troubled times.  As for the blues and black music…

Rip Tide

September 22, 2018 - 8:59pm - by Linn Barnes

There is confusion on the beach.

The birds are marching in close formation.

I strain the sand for sight or sound

and read the waves for the drowning man.

I am upended in the roaring surf,

dragged into the fleeing tide,

swept to the edge of the deep blue,

lashed to the fins of a bottle nosed giant:

Where I am flashed the horror of some past life

colliding with the unimaginable, now at speed,

dragged rudely  to twenty fathoms,  scraping the bottom,

finally surfaced and marooned on an unknown shore.

The Mystery of Rue de Montevideo

September 20, 2018 - 3:32pm - by Linn Barnes

The Mystery of Rue de Montevideo

-Linn Barnes

The summer of my sixteenth year events other than fishing were creeping into my schedule.  I mean girl events.  I had met Ned Chaucer, his brother Nattie and his older sister Nancy the summer before, and, by now, we were all old friends, these things had a predictable trajectory.  Nancy was two years older than me and Ned Chaucer, who was exactly my age.  Nattie and Ned, my brother, were the same age and were becoming friends.  The Chaucer family was friendly and fun.  They had a very beautiful house on the south end of Bethany and would come for a month or so each summer.  Sonny Chaucer, Ned’s father, ran the family estate in Leesburg, Virginia with his wife, Nancy (‘Big Nancy’), a beautiful and very wise woman, although to all of us they would be forever Mr and Mrs Chaucer.  They were wealthy in an old world way, exhibiting none of the trappings of the ‘nouveau riche’.  They were completely free of any the pomposity so often associated with the very rich, for godsakes, they drove chevys.  I, of course, fell in love with Nancy that summer and remained so for a very long time.  I think she was amused by me, liked my blond, smiley facade and seemed to even think my guitar playing was special, if maybe a little weird.

My earliest contacts with girls had been juvenile and on the mysterious side.  In France, in 1953, in La Varenne, outside of Paris,  when I was ten years old, I had a crush on my best friend Billy Ellis’s sister, Joannie, a year-plus younger than me.  She was a beautiful little girl with wide eyes and a big heart.  Childhood loves are wonderful and mysterious.  You just have no idea what to do, say or how to act.  Nothing makes any sense, and that’s the way it was for me.  After we moved into Paris proper the following year, a very strange relationship developed, after a fashion.  We lived on Rue de Montevideo in the 16th arrondissement, which was the re-doubt of what remained of the French aristocracy in Paris  and the rising new class of wealth and prosperity which developed after the nightmare of 1789.  We lived in a townhouse several stories high and across the street from an almost invisible Jewish Synagogue, whatever that was.  One day while returning from my fancy little Jesuit school, École Gerson, situated not far away in the Rue de la Pompe, I saw a beautiful young girl with an older woman walking on the other side of my street.  I had no chance to say anything, nor any reason to, but we for some reason exchanged eye contact for a brief moment before she vanished into the doorway to the Synagogue.  The shocking thing was that she had smiled at me.  The Synagogue was not in any way obvious and from what my parents had told me about the way the Jewish people had been treated, I was not surprised.  I asked my father about the Jews in France and he carefully avoided any direct reference to what I was to soon understand to be anti-Semitism on a grand scale in la belle France, anti-Semitism that persisted to that day, in spite of the fact that Hitler and Hitlerism had been soundly crushed by the combined allied forces. I asked our lovely Bretonne maid, cook and housekeeper Leonne, a wonderful woman who had been living with us full time for more than a year and was an indispensable part of our family operation, if she could tell me anything about Jews in France.  Without batting an eyelash she told me that the ‘youpin’, which I would later learn was something like ‘kike’ or ‘yid’, were not really welcome in France, but there ‘were still a lot of them’.  She pretty much gave me what I would soon discover was the usual ‘Jews are really not human and, anyway, they killed Jesus’ mythology.  I was eleven years old and had no idea about what I was hearing.  It would be years before the full impact of what she had told me finally sunk in.  That it was not just the Germans who wished ill upon the Jews, but most of Europe, and a large percentage of my own country, as well.  Anti-Semitism, I would eventually learn, was wide-spread in the western world and beyond.  But none of this could dampen what I had encountered in the rue de Montevideo across the street from our house.  I could not erase the image of this beautiful, dark haired little girl, about my age, with flashing dark eyes and a secret smile with whom I had exchanged a momentary glance.  Our living room was on the first floor, that is one floor above street level.  There were large windows onto the street below and which looked directly into the upper floors of the Synagogue across the street.  I had taken to perching in one of the windows for a while each day after school before dinner was served.  Then it happened.  One day I looked across the street and there in a window parallel to me was the beautiful girl I had seen in the street.  She noticed me right away, graced me with a lovely  smile and vanished.  This happened periodically for the next two years.  I was, I suppose, hopelessly in love, with no hope of ever even meeting this divinity across the way.  I was being initiated into the mysteries of women from which I was never to recover. 

When we returned to Washington in 1956, I was enrolled in Alice Deal Junior High School near where we lived in North West Washington, DC.  There were all  kinds of kids in that school, including a significant population of Jewish kids.  I gravitated to that crowd almost immediately.  I was thirteen years old, and surrounded by absolutely gorgeous, sexy and unimaginably mature Jewish girls, who for some reason had taken a shining to me.  One of them, a dark haired sultry beauty, even called me her young ‘French prince’.  I dated and was in love with Jewish girls all of my junior high experience.  Here I was, this Irish-Catholic refugee from the streets of Paris, France living a profoundly real enactment of what I had begun to think of as ‘the mystery of rue de Montevideo’.  Finally meeting these creatures of my dreams, from whom I had been so carefully segregated from ever meeting, was and remains one of the most dramatic experiences of my life.  However, at the core of all of this was the profound love of the mysterious which, one way or another, would define the rest of my life. 

The beach was a heaven for teenagers, boys and girls.  My luck at having gotten to know Nancy Chaucer was astounding, but not limited to her.  There were other what I can only describe as dream events taking place.  For instance, I would regularly, especially on rough days, when the fishing was less than optimal, go sit on the boardwalk near the bowling alley or a little south near a coffee and doughnut joint that was very popular in the morning.  Families would  be gathering on the beach for the day and it was a fine scene to watch from a distance.  I loved to speculate about the families arriving, where they were from, how old the kids were and so forth.  I think I was eighteen when one day I noticed an extraordinarily beautiful girl arrive with her mother, father, and I assumed her brother, who appeared younger than her by a couple of years.  She was a vision of purity and youth, about five five, long black hair, sparkling eyes and teeth, an amazing perfect body stem to stern and a wide open smile that could bring you to tears.  I sat spellbound on the boardwalk watching her, amazed by her, really quite lost in the vision of her, when all of a sudden she looked up and caught me in the act.  I quickly turned away, deeply embarrassed to have been nabbed in basically a voyeuristic act.  I thought about leaving, but I just couldn’t, so I stuck it out, pretending to be occupied with something or other happening off to the north.  I was concentrating so hard on not noticing that I failed to notice she had come over to the boardwalk just under where I was perched.  She laughed a little, which I heard, and asked me if I liked the beach.  I gagged, caught in my childish reverie, and said something banal like, I guess, and, how about you, or something pitifully lame along those lines. Then we both had a short laugh and the heat was turned down a notch or two.  She was certainly younger than me by at least two years, maybe three, but she had that certain unmistakable confidence that beautiful and smart girls always seemed to exude.  They really were a different species, only allowing we males to stutter and make fools of ourselves in front of them until they vanished, never to be seen again, which is what I was sure would happen, so, I tried to make the best of it while it lasted.  We both revealed that our fathers were government people, her's, an Air Force officer, mine, here I had to hem and haw or a second or two, a foreign service officer.  We spoke a little of our respective travels with our families to mainly Europe and, in her case, many Air Force bases throughout the country, as well.  She said she lived in Northern Virginia outside of Washington, while I explained I lived in the city.  And then she smiled that same smile, turned and ran off to her family and raced to the water with her brother, diving repeatedly into a large inner tube they had dragged along.  She reminded me of a porpoise, gracefully leaping over the tube and vanishing into the churning sea, only to re-appear and do it again, and again.  I was mesmerized and she knew it.  I watched her for a long and painful time until I just plain got up and forlornly headed home. This pattern of marginal contact, none really outside the shadows of my own head, continued for a week, until finally one day she did not appear.  I went day after day hoping to see this lovely creature, but it was not to be.  She was gone.  But not the memory of her, which bore into my mind with an alarming power, as helpless as it was.  It reminded me intensely of the encounter many years ago with the ghostly Jewish girl on the rue de Montevideo, in Paris.  I could not possibly even guess that I would see her again, years later in Munich, Germany. 

‘Mysterium mundi gravitas est.'

Shark!

September 19, 2018 - 6:38pm - by Linn Barnes

This morning I went out a little late to the same spot I began fishing with my father maybe 75 years ago. It is just off the south end of the Bethany Beach boardwalk. The weather had cleared and it was a perfect September morning with a cool and building breeze from the NE. There was one other fisherman and his family on the beach. I watched him as I was setting up my rod and chair and he was not engaged.

I baited with bunker I had filleted the night before, threw a pretty fair cast, and almost immediately got a hit and pulled in a very small blue, which I thru back. Several casts later, with the sea and wind rising, I got a substantial hit, let him go for a second or two and hit him hard and it was game on. This was a powerful fish who I had to play very carefully for about ten minutes. Although he was strong, I could tell by the way he fought that he was neither a blue, striper or weakfish (sea-trout). I knew he was a shark by the way he moved and used his weight to fight me. Out of nowhere a small crowd of on lookers had assembled just as I was bringing the fish to shore. I saw him in the waves and confirmed that he was a sand shark, and looked to weigh about twenty-five pounds or so. Without too much trouble I was able to drag him onto the beach. The trick at this point was to get him unhooked and back in the sea without harming him. I got him on his back and was able to extricate the hook with pliers that I carry for just that reason. This critter may have been small, I guess less than the 'lethal' version of sharkdom, but you did not want to allow that mouth full of very serious looking teeth anywhere near you. All went well, a nice guy took a couple of pictures and off he went.

Nothing else appeared the rest of the morning. I packed up and went back to the house. I would soon be back.

Fishing in September at Bethany

September 17, 2018 - 1:45pm - by Linn Barnes

Tomorrow we leave for 10 days at Bethany Beach, Delaware, where I learned to surf fish with my father almost 70 years ago. Allison and I go twice every year, once in June, then again in September. June is usually a bomb for me, but September has had it's high spots. The fishing can be very good, or, as I suspect it will be this year, thanks to Ms Florence, non-existent. However, that will not dampen my 'will to fish' ( wonder if Freddy N would approve?). I shall be en place chaques jour sur la plage, same spot, same bait, same everything, as I shall do until I can no more. Those of you who fish will understand this sentiment. Those of you who do not fish will probably get it too, only for other reasons, mostly pathological I would guess.

I am hoping to work on the fishing book as well. I've had some good luck with writing at the beach. I think I'm about four chapters from finishing the first draft. If the weather really closes in I'll be at it. If it's nice, and if I'm lucky maybe I'll get to it anyway. Best plan is no plan.

We always take a bucket of musical instrument and even some recording gear. In the past we've come up with some new stuff, stuff we've liked a lot and later recorded. It's also a good moment to plan and create the winter programs for Dumbarton and Castleton and anything else that materializes. 

Sometimes There is Nothing

September 14, 2018 - 8:57pm - by Linn Barnes

Sometimes There Is Nothing

by Linn Barnes

I got to the beach once again very early on what promised to be a good day.  The wind was steady, off shore on the oblique from the east and slightly to the north.  It was late September and good to be alone at five am, in the early starless morning waiting for the light to take the edge off what was left of the night.  I set up my little camp as I had done hundreds of times before, surprised at how much I always enjoyed the simple ritual of installation which always brought me a degree of comfort and ameliorated some of the ever present discomfort with the close to total darkness I had to operate in.  It was as if I was establishing a perimeter, a safe fortress against whatever might materialize in the dark.  First the rod spike to hold the very long surf rod was installed in the wet sand, while I unfolded and planted my canvas chair, equipped with back, arms and cupholders.  Then I removed my vest, a fresh water fly fisherman’s vest, with many pockets to hold all the gear I needed.  This made it possible to not bring a tackle box, one more heavy item to lug along over the considerable stretch of sand to the water.  The vest, which was loaded with assorted rigs, lead weights, extra knife, glasses, cut and whole mullet for bait, anything I could imagine I might need for the morning, including a couple of pieces of thick buttered dark bread that my wife, Allison, had baked the day before and a small thermos of strong black coffee, was dropped over the back of the chair to keep it from blowing away should the wind pick up.  I planted the thermos in the sand next to me next to the bait board.  I put on the windbreaker I had brought along tied to my waist over my hooded sweatshirt and finally sat for a moment.  I poured myself a small amount of the strong coffee and listened to the ocean, hardly discernible in the dark, the waves breaking a mere ten yards from my encampment, which I would soon have to move back further up on the sand as the tide gained ground. This was the perfect time to be here, installed and ready for what the sea might offer on an early Fall morning.

My father used to scale the mullet before threading it onto the hook.  I did so for years, until I finally realized that the scales if left on the flesh would help anchor the bait to the hook and, in addition to securing the bait during the cast, make the attacking fish strike more deliberately to get to it, which would in the end help me to properly set the hook.  Most fishermen talk about ‘which’ bait is correct, but it seemed to me it was much more important ‘how’ you baited the hook, how much bait to use, the size of the hook and how to most effectively thread it on the hook.  If you were convinced only small ‘snapper’  blues were your prey, keep the portion of bait small, as well as the hook.  On the other hand, if you had any evidence of larger fish, you used larger hooks and larger baits, up to, with certain special rigs, an entire mullet.  You wanted the fish to attack the entire presentation, bait and hook, before you reacted.  Otherwise, if the bait or the hook was too big you were doomed to a day of ‘nibbles’ and ‘nudges’, which would after even a long session result in nothing but annoyance and frustration at a lost morning.  Like everything else, deliberation and careful analysis really mattered.  And, perhaps more importantly, you had to be willing to change what you thought you had perfectly figured out.  Eyes, ears, migrations of porpoises north and south and flights and concentrations of sea birds were your tools.  One thing was certain, this was not a passive activity, as people sometimes thought fishing to be.  Not in the least.  Full concentration was the order of the day.  Anything less, and you were just ‘on the beach’, which, of course, had it’s place, but not for the serious fisherman.  Fishing seriously had a way of bringing you not just ‘onto’ the beach but ‘into’ the ‘idea of the beach’ and the sea, scribing a pallet of manifold possibilities, both exterior and within.

I made what I thought to be a good cast into the dark, listening for the weight to hit the water, but hearing nothing but the wind and the waves.  I could tell however that it was a good cast by the amount of line that had peeled off the reel.  I let the rig anchor itself, waited, standing, for a couple of minutes and returned to my chair and coffee, after securing the rod in the sand spike holder next to my chair.  I always arranged the rod close to my right arm so that I could be in constant contact with the rod even when I was having coffee or eating.  It was absolutely necessary that you consider the rod an extension of your body equipped with all the requisite muscles and nerves.  Of course, it was possible for a fish to hook itself by the ferocity of it’s attack driving the hook firmly into the flesh of its  mouth, but not as likely as when you were in control of the many variables which were presented to you on any given occasion. 

I waited a long time.  And, then a very long time.  I reeled my line in, checked my bait and concluded nothing had touched it.  I cast again.  And I waited, again.  Nothing.  Not a nudge, not a nibble.  Nothing but waves and encroaching tide, now forcing me to pull my camp further up on to the beach.  Re-situated, I poured myself more coffee and made myself comfortable for the long run.  Time went by, slowly.  The sun was rising and burning into my face.  I pulled my hat over my eyes and my collar up against the increasing wind.  The sensation of heat from the direct sun  and the cold wind simultaneously assaulting me was a little bewildering, but I had seen it before.  It was only the ocean, sun and wind, no more, nothing else.  Although it did give me the impression that I was not welcome on this morning.  Unwelcome by who, or what?  I felt a little unglued, but in control, nevertheless.  I checked the line for the tight bond I needed with the bait and weight on the other end.  And then I did it again.  And, finally I began to relax, to sit back in my chair and let the sea have its way.  It was all way beyond my control.  The truth was simple.  I was happy enough just being there, a witness to all of it.  I thought about how much everything had changed since my arrival before dark, and how long ago that now seemed.  I had the clear sensation of evolving with the morning, changing with the tide, the sand and the wind.  I felt more akin to the gulls floating on the wind near me and the fish in the sea not far from me than my own now foreign and distant world of things and fellow humans.  I began to imagine myself strapped to my chair, an obligatory witness to all events unfolding before me, the sirens in the waves singing madly - strange melodies unimaginable by any human, known only to the sea and the fish I was there to kill and devour.  Once again the tide was coming close, my feet now covered by the encroaching waves.  I wanted to move back, but I did not.  The sea was gaining ground and I chose to stay in place, for what reason I had no idea.  Finally when I glanced at my feet now submerged in the water, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that my thermos of coffee was afloat and about to be carried off by the tide, and, only then did I break the trance like state I had fallen into, rise from my chair, recover my errant thermos and retreat further back up on the beach with my rod, rod holder and chair now on safer ground above the reach of the incoming ocean. 

I sat for a long time.  The passivity and therefore persistent danger of the ocean dominated my thoughts.  It was all a question of ebb and flow, no more, just the tides.  There were no metaphysics involved, no volition, no plan. The ocean was overwhelming, sometimes shocking and more dangerous than you could imagine, without ever being anything more than what it was.  It was a very strange thing to say, ‘The sea giveth and the sea taketh away’, which you frequently found in various sea going cultures.  This is a serious confusion, ascribing a form of consciousness to what is the weight of water and the moon rocking around our tiny orb, a speck lost on a distant wing of a minor galaxy, but one which is our very own.  To understand our existence here and now requires no more than an understanding of the elegance of a good cast and with luck the retrieval of a beautiful fish. 

But not on this morning.  No matter the wind, waves and tide, all perfect.  No matter the bait, the line, the weight and the cast, all perfect.  On this morning there was nothing, as it so often can be, in spite of the wind and waves and perfect tide, in spite of all things, there was still nothing.