Load Em' Out!

Raisin' Up Catfish: Thirty-five

Comfrey: 1972

A special, frantic energy infused each of us on Fridays as we loaded tons of our fattened catfish into water-filled trucks; shiny tankers piloted by guys named Deke, and Bubba, and Hoot, who paid for their fish with fat wads of cash, then tipped their caps and drove them away. Pilgrimages north. Temporary destinations. Bud’s Fish ‘Em Out in Broussard, Missouri. Johnny’s U-Catch, just west of Nashville. Or understated, Pipestone Putt-Putt, Cat-U-Fish and Famous Salt Water Taffy, near Coldwater, Minnesota. These unique little capitalistic stopovers and roadside attractions were nothing more than profitable pauses really, catfish on their way through another muddy lake or pond, before swimming in a fry pan of hot grease and onto some kitchen platter.

Load out days were painful …and wet, but strangely exhilarating as well.

After seining one of the twenty or so, multi-acre ponds under production we’d stake the tail end of the net into a circular corral overnight, then tighten it up even more the next morning, directly beneath the large steel pipe that fed in cold well water, day and night, to each pond as needed. Through that protruding pipe, suspended a dozen or more feet beyond the shoreline and three to six feet above the pond’s surface came life; bubbling, oxygenated water tumbling into the fishy fray, helping slow down thousands of frantic, disoriented aquatic metabolisms, oxygenating the crowded soup, chilling our needle-spined, rubbery-skinned, ‘crop’ to minimize their stress.

These well pipes varied in diameter from six to twelve inches, depending on a pond’s acreage and subsequent water needs, but regardless of size, all ran icy cold, their flowing contents refrigerated deep beneath the ground.

If those frigid, underground waters had a calming effect on cold-blooded fish, they most certainly did not have the same effect on us. Instead, something about them and the mass-animation of seething icthyology swirling within them made us feel invigorated and powerful, like warriors on a battlefield, painful wounds be damned.

Each time we waded into that chilled tumble in early morning light we knew we had a job to do, both brutal and demanding; a task that would wring every last ounce of energy from our bodies before we earned our reprieve sometime in the glare and swelter of afternoon, having suffered many wounds. Knowing all this in advance, we attacked anyway, like madmen. And not a one of us ever really understood why.

Dipping and loading fish was nothing like the slow drudgery of kicking and dumping the mud-line of a tractor-pulled seine across a pond. Wrestling a basket full of writhing, splashing, live fish was breathtaking and immediate. Pain became a distant sensation, as did the cold. There was a purity and a beauty to the maelstrom. Our only thoughts were of the battle itself. We would count up our wounds, do our bragging and utter our complaints after.

Still vivid are pictures from a merely imagined vantage, floating lazily above the entire chaotic scene; a kind of ‘angel’s vision.’ I see my companions and I wade reluctantly into an icy swarm of spiny-finned catfish, bathed in the ruddy glow of early morning while Bone takes long drags off a Kent cigarette and fires up the ancient, diesel-powered Bucyrus-Erie crane. Vernon struts the levee top checking his hand-scrawled notes (order weights and water temps), directing trucks into position and barking out a litany of self-important orders, as usual. His job as the weigh-in guy keeps him mostly warm and dry, tonnage talley and tongue wagging. If it weren’t for his third grade math skills this would have seemed a perfect fit.

Those of us in the water were a sad, rag-tag looking army, unarmed. Canvas sneakers and thin cotton work clothes. Heavy, gray, industrial grade ‘laundry baskets’ built especially for fish. Bare hands. Goose bumps. Early morning shivers.

The fish, inevitably skittish from their overnight crowding and confinement exploded into a frenzy of slashing spines and muddy water with each sudden movement. Each dip of our baskets set off another blast. Muddy spray everywhere. Hands full. Sputtering gasps for breath. Blinking, burning eyes and no way to wipe them. Clouded vision.

It was impossible to load out a day's requisite tonnage without dozens of small, painful puncture wounds: arms, legs, feet, hands. Even without all the stab wounds, the work would have been exhausting. But it moved so fast, pressed so hard, grew so heavy. You could get no weaker or wetter standing beneath an icy waterfall. You could, however, have gotten much cleaner.

I continually grappled against my physical limitations in efforts to keep even pace with Zak and Mose (and ahead of Pudge), though with marginal success. Wrestling hundred-pound baskets of wriggling fish up out of the water and over my head, hour after hour was definitely not my best trick. Still, as the skinniest, newest, whitest worker on the team it was a matter of pride. I was determined to pull my equal share, in spite of immense and obvious differences in our strength …I was not about to have anyone call me lazy. Far as I know, no one ever did.

We loaded between thirty and forty-five thousand pounds of live fish into trucks each Friday, and sometimes on Wednesdays as well for a stretch of several weeks. Which put my fair share at somewhere between eight and twelve thousand pounds per session, dipping, wrestling, and then dumping them into a trap-doored weighing basket at the end of a steel cable.

The crane operator was really the lynchpin of the whole operation and he alone had the power to make our lives in the water either easier or substantially harder, depending on his skills. Bone was pure a magician, swinging the basket up and over to one of the open lids on a waiting tanker with scarcely a pause, a slip or a miss. Vernon, on the other hand was a nightmare. Whenever he worked the crane (Bone was trying to train him), we spent as much time dodging the falling or wildly swinging basket as we did loading it. And following each screw up, we’d have to re-dip the baskets of fish we’d lost while falling backward, and damn if we didn’t have to endure yet again another round of stabs from the frightened fish we fell upon.

Everything on Fridays had to be accomplished quickly, getting our ‘crop’, as it were, out of the ponds, weighed within the suspended cage basket, into refrigerated water, and onto the highways with a minimum of time and stress.

Once our babies left us, they still faced six to twelve hours of northbound travel, before arriving at the ‘pay-per-fish’ ponds, where folks (or so we were told), made weekend pilgrimages out of nearby towns and cities just to sit for a few hours at the edge of a dock or in lawn chairs lining muddy banks, before forking over cash money in exchange for whatever they caught.

I’m only telling you what the truck drivers told us; claimed folks came out in droves and paid handsomely …by the pound. Those fat rolls of cash they used to pay for the fish sure as hell added weight to their claims.

Shirtless Pudge, who fed himself and his drunkard daddy on a steady diet of trot-line caught channel cats from nearby swamp cricks and the river whistled, without a lick of irony one sultry Friday as the last truck drove away, “Dem peoples up nowth sho is strange.”

Pay to fish didn’t sound much like fishing to me either, but it sure as hell gave us a job.

We all decided in unison one day, standing waist deep in the filthy churn, with the wriggling basket draining above our heads and Vernon waiting to record its proper weight that there must surely be some voodoo ‘Hairy-Krishnu’ type, chanting all hocus-pocus and Zen master, who could have passed through the muddy maelstrom of those Friday morning load-outs, wound-free, but that we regular, miserable, sopping wet grunts most certainly could not. We vowed a pact do our best that day not to flail, to remain steady and calm, to surrender to the spiny storm.

It was impossible not to make a hundred costly moves an hour since every few moments one of us lost our balance on the slippery bottom or fell backward into the frenzy. Whenever one of us did, worst among his punishments was stepping down on one of the spiny fish and getting stabbed in the foot, then falling backward yet again for even further pain and insults, which meant more panic in the fish and more outstretched spines. Everyone suffered.

We were acutely aware, at least theoretically of a need for inner calm in our labors (‘catfish kung-fu’, Zak called it). We all practiced our best tranquil movements in efforts to beat the odds. Unfortunately none of us ever proved any better than rank novices at the spiritual work of avoiding falls and fish stabs. We could not levitate. We could not speak gentle, Jesus-like commands to calm the angry throng. Our labors took place within the ichthyological equivalent of a hornet's nest after all, practically begging to be punished.

One morning with bitter memories of the past week's wounds still vivid and a festering cut on the inside of his left foot, Mose decided to wear an old pair of boot-footed, chest waders into the melee to save himself a new round of stabs. The rest of us of course were immediately jealous of this self-protecting foresight and began our morning dripping with envy and self-pity in much the same way we would soon be dripping shitty water.

The bright green of our envy faded quickly, however as Mose’s waders filled with shit water within just minutes, either stabbed full of holes by the fish, or more likely, cracked and leaky to begin with. Whichever the case, Zak, Pudge and I quickly abandoned any further thoughts of self-pity and began snickering out loud at what a stupid idea those waders had been in the first place. Then we started to badger poor Mose.

“Uhhh, you know, Mose,” I started in, bullshitting just as condescendingly as I could, “part of yo’ problem is the way those waders take away your sense of feel …and contact with the fish.” (That, of course, being precisely what he'd hoped to do).

“Crazy fucked up fool!” laughed Zak. “You know you cain’t strut yo’ moves right in dem damn thing.”

“You knows it. Fish knows it too,” he clucked.

“What you think’n, cousin? You think they fish as stupid as you iz?”

“Yeah, man!” Pudge chimed in, exhaling a long draw off a quick cigarette while the truck on the levee inched forward. “You gotta’ glide through ‘em... a hot knife in butter. Don’t matter how crazy it git. You be smooth and cool, why they ain’t even gonna’ bother yaAAAIIHhhh...!” he shrieked then, as some pissed off three pounder spined him in the thigh.

“GODDAMMIT!” Pudge doubled over suddenly then, in pain.

“MOTHERFUCK!” he bellowed, slapping at the water, as if that one fish among thousands who’d just spined him could understand or give a damn.

In that one hilarious instant, our entire charade of mock concern and wisdom fell out the window and we all cracked up together, laughing openly, but this time at Pudge.

Even Mose, who’d been pouting began to laugh as he waded toward the shore. When he waddled out of the water in his latest bad idea, fully ballooned and leaking from several places, he looked pathetic. He shook his head in disgust and we all fell silent. Then, he plopped down on the bank, lay back in the grass with dingy water flowing out all around him and slowly wriggled free, like a snake shedding its troublesome skin.

He threw those damn waders emphatically into the weeds and scurried up the levee to his shiny car to grab his work sneakers, at which point Zak began to cheer and clap, like a pitch-man at a tent revival. When the rest of us joined in Mose bowed playfully, then waded back into the fray. He was just one of the hapless gang once again, unprotected and vulnerable just like us, a mere canvas-shod foot soldier on the watery battlefield of a Friday morning.

We were all relieved, though perhaps no one more than Mose himself.

And then the emptied basket slapped hard into the water between us to call us all back to work. We groaned and sputtered, though still smiling, and leaned in to dip another load.

© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

To read more about the art of seining:

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When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.

Though some chapters of Raisin’ Up Catfish will be only be available to paid subscribers, this one is available free to everyone. If you would like to read others of the thirty chapters from this unfolding memoir published thus far, please click on Raisin’ Up Catfish at the top of this page, or in the menu bar at the top of my Substack home page.