| sand bar days |
[Sep. 24th, 2006|01:42 pm] |
On Friday night, as I drove through deep woods in Arkansas river bottomland, a large, burly raccoon crossed the road, intact, just ahead of my car. Early Saturday morning I chatted with my nephew about Alaskan salmon and bow and arrow targets while we drove him to rendezvous with his other grandparents. Saturday late morning, my ten year old niece and I went to a lake state park and flew a Star Wars kite, after we stopped to admire the 1930something Austin Opal my father has begun restoring.
 We also rode rusted rental bikes past fishing docks which confronted a low-level water-famished lake. We could not rent paddle boats because the wind was up but the water was down. "Maybe in the Spring", the ranger said.
Saturday afternoon, after a nap, my father and I watched on television as the Arkansas Razorbacks defeated the Alabama Crimson Tide in a football game by the closest of overtime scores after a festival of error better suited to a convention of theologians than football. A huge thunderstorm arrived in sheets of rain. At halftime, my niece and I played Go Fish with a deck of cards from years ago in which almost no pairs matched anything.
Saturday evening, my father and his wife took me to The Sand Bar for dinner, where the grilled red snapper was tasty, and our table was beside my eleventh grade English teacher, a good egg I do not know well, who now apparently teaches yoga instead.
Saturday late night we viewed digital pictures of towboats on the Ouachita River and cruises down the Ohio River on a paddle wheeler as well as home tour pictures in period costume. Then I settled in with two books (a science fiction by L.E. Modesitt and the latest paperback 1st Ladies' Detective Agency installment) and electronica on my mp3 player for
a well-deserved rest. On Sunday morning I rose pre-dawn and drove through foggy skies back to Texas. |
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| Comments: |
Sounds like a lovely weekend! (:
It was a good weekend, and it was great to see family.
Your visual excursions in these pages have been reminding me very much of the freaky dream imagery from Wim Wenders' film Until the End of the World, which is one of my favorite films, both for its brilliance and its ungainly flaws. I think you'd like it.
Also, what is the bottomland?
I have not seen that film, so I will seek it out.
Bottom land is the lowland near a river. It is wetlands, and it has its own special wildness. in borrom land, all sorts of things exist--feral horses from Spanish days, and all manner of curious creatures and plants
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/10994159/1418390) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) glw
2006-09-26 12:45 am (UTC)
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So you're in a town where catfish is king and you order red snapper. One wonders what was passing through your mind at that moment. "Hope Springs Eternal..." perhaps.
Funny story from NPR: apparently there's some sort of scandal going on in Florida in which restaurant fish, no matter what is advertised, is actually catfish. That was about the time I went down there on business so I just eliminated the uncertainty and order the catfish straight away.
I love catfish, too, and I like it grilled, for that matter, but the grilled place we were at had good red snapper.
Nothing is more sublime, of course, than real fried catfish from a real catfish place, but that was not within the dietary budget saturday. | |
