Someone has fixed up--at least painted--the beach cottage we lived in since I was out there last.
But the beach, which I remember as a broad expanse of sand, from the dunes
to the surf, is mostly gone. The dunes are gone, replaced by riprap.
That was a great summer, after the mutiny.
Of course, we paid for
that, later, when the principal investigator took our lab keys away and revoked our
membership in the Order of the Blue Trowel, his Teacher's Pet Club for true believers,
company men, and his hand-picked cadre of people marked for...ah, what-anal retentive
obsessive-compulsivism? Involutional melancholia? Eating disorder? Alcoholism?
Clinical depression? Excessive absenteeism?
Jack Neff visited, and could
stay for two weeks, since the principal investigator wasn't there. He'd gone to
Stuttgart to present a paper on the pottery type he had defined, Norwood, to a scientific
congress.
Ripley Bullen says Norwood is Orange. He already defined fiber-tempered
complicated-stamped.
I had an altercation on the mound, a contretemps,
let's say, with the principal investigator's executive officer, who was gone too,
for the rest of the field season.
Executive Officer is abbreviated X. O.
Commanding Officer is abbreviated C. O. But C. O. Jones is cojones, as Lawrence
Block tells us, in a mystery, I had an adrenaline jones, a problem with authority,
I had to be crossways with authority, see how far I could push it, I was like Sean
Connery being pushed by Harry Andrews in The Hill.
I didn't push back,
I took it.
Everything he dished out, I took.
* * *
In loco parentis had flew the coop. The inmates had taken over the
asylum. Jay Johnson made five gallons of raisin jack for our wedding reception.
Chaos reigned.
We locked the shovel box to a tree instead of carrying it
back and forth to the site every day.
* * *
Connie Mae Fowler owned a stilt house out on Alligator Point, after she was
an Oprah Book Club selection, but she moved inland, so she wouldn't have to worry
about the hurricanes.
I ride them out, like Walter Anderson on Horn Island.