Crabs and Snapping Turtles

Crabs and Snapping Turtles

It was a steamy summer in 1951, long before air-conditioning was commonplace, and I would turn nine that year. The sultry days and life as we knew it in the small Midwestern town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin had fallen into a lazy routine.

The Greenwood Street kids: Bobby Jung, the Green twins, Barb and Betty, Sandy Dauterman, Dave Richter, Barbara Hartkopf, Peter Thresher, my best friend Mary Ellen Dana and I loved to escape the heat by descending to the lush greenness that lay under and beyond the Twelfth Street Bridge. There below, the concrete walls and rippling waters never failed to cool our sensibilities, even at 80% humidity and on 98-degree days.

The east branch of the Fond du Lac River was a prominent feature of our neighborhood. It funneled rainwater off the farmed hills south of town, under the bridge, and through the city to Lake Winnebago. The riverbank was another world, a Mark Twain setting in the middle of residential Fond du Lac, and our generation knew instinctively how to enjoy it.

Ten or twelve feet beneath the street level, the shore afforded comfort, privacy, and endless entertainment. Our access to it was a steep, slick path, which descended to the hospitable west bank. There, a path along the water had been worn bare from daily use and, if wet, was also slippery. If someone did go off the edge, he would get wet, but no one ever drowned there. The waterway was roughly fifteen feet wide, but shallow.

Mary Ellen and I parked our bikes alongside others on the sidewalk and carefully slipped down the passageway into the riparian realm. There we joined the neighborhood congregation in the inviting coolness under the rangy trees.

Unless it rained, we all knew the daily ritual. The previous afternoon, I pedaled to Mr. Blamey's meat market on Main Street next to Dille's Grocery and Thiel Drug. I went to purchase a small paper tray of red, glistening kidney. Being too short to conduct business over the meat case, I stood at one end and watched as Mr. B selected a nickel-sized hunk for me. He always wore a white starched hat shaped like the ones we made from folded paper, and a white apron, which, by the time I came in, was stained with the blood of his work.

He knew me and my purpose. We made idle conversation and I assumed that if he had grown up in the neighborhood, he likely had first-hand experience with kidney and the Twelfth Street Bridge. He turned to the worktable along the back wall where he wrapped my purchase in white paper torn from the big roll and secured the neat folds with string from the cone on the nearby spindle. The transaction was brief, cost five cents, and provided fodder for hours of idle diversion the next day.

I was up and dressed at the crack of dawn. I grabbed the kidney package and peddled my bike to the bridge where I joined my pals. Our hardware consisted of fishing poles and three battered galvanized laundry tubs. Someone had already dragged the tubs into position along the path where they would receive the object of our expedition. We each had saved the four-foot stick fishing pole from the day before. We used a length of string tied to the weak end for fishing line.

The scrawny trees furnished an endless supply of replacement poles and the kidney package string was put to good use as line when needed. Bobby or Dave whittled a smallish hunk of kidney off the mother piece for each participant. I tied my pole string around a meaty fragment with a four-way wrap so it wouldn't be lost to the river current or an unusually tenacious critter. One piece of meat, if secured carefully, lasted the whole day. Then it was only a matter of finding a promising spot and dangling the bloody morsel in the water. Once set, we wiled away the day fishing for crayfish. Cambarus diogenes, we called 'em crabs.

The blood in the water was irresistible to our resident lobster relations. Sensing it, they ventured forth and clamped on to the meat in lusty anticipation of a tasty meal. A slight tremor in the pole signaled the action. If I was alert and careful, I could delicately hoist the meat out of the river and suspend it over the nearest tub with passenger still attached. This was an acquired skill.

At some point, the crab would appreciate the change of scenery and let loose of its lunch only to fall on the heap of crustaceans in the tub. No touching was required, which was an important consideration for us girls. However, when the action slowed, we could count on one of the boys to locate a particularly large specimen and torment us with it. This behavior never failed to elicit squeals and screams sufficient to create a jagged gash in the lower levels of the atmosphere.

On a good day, the assembled fleet of fishers amassed an impressive collection of live crabs. No one actually wanted them, so, when we'd had enough for the day, or the tubs were full, the boys tipped them over, dumped all crabs back into the river, and we moved on to another location for a game of 'mumblety-peg' or 'kick the can'. These creatures never learned that what seemed a tempting meal was only a cruel hoax. This truism allowed us to repeat the ritual the next day, and the next, and the one after, all with parallel results.

While waiting on crab traffic, I frequently daydreamed about cloud shapes and river floaters. Clouds required intense study and patience while they morphed, but, in due course, I could equate nearly all to something in my sphere. The other point of abstraction was the eventual fate of maunderers that drifted in and out of view. There is a direct connection between the Fond du Lac River and the Atlantic Ocean. I could visualize how any given object that floated past me would look in Quebec, alongside ocean-going vessels, or being locked through the gates at the Soo.

One of the magnetic attractions of our childhood was the east bank and the need to cross the river to get to it. The challenge to get there by some means other than the obvious convenience of the bridge seemed to be born in all of us. It was somewhat akin to that perverse need to touch ones tongue to metal playground equipment in sub-freezing temperatures. To that end, previous explorers had positioned lumpy stones at functional intervals on the riverbed.

They stuck out of the water and were large enough on which to plant at least one foot. In corrupt alignment, they were positioned slightly upstream and directly under the bridge where the water was no more that a foot deep anywhere. Years of use and rippling splash had worn them smooth, making them slick. Nevertheless, they did provide a short cut to the far side and summoned us with siren song.

Seemingly without external stimulus and, as if possessed of St Vitus dance, someone would periodically jump to their feet and challenge the rocks. To cross the breach meant springing from one to the next with the delicate balance of a high ironworker. The goal was to land a foot with sufficient precision on the wobbly platforms to avoid the embarrassment of a soaker. They often rolled enough to maintain the challenge no matter how many past successes one enjoyed.

General good-natured horseplay came to bear here. Often, the spectacle of a child trying his or her skill at this test invited the "help" of a friend. This assistance was usually sufficient to upset the delicate balance of nature and the pretender would slip into the drink, frequently taking the helper along.

Once or twice each summer, our bloody bait attracted a snapping turtle. Such an arrival inspired a response similar to poking a stick in a hornet's nest. One of the boys would jump in and cautiously hoist the prize, mouth agape, and threatening, out of the water and into the circle of onlookers. All my silly concerns about crabs vanished when I looked at the business end of this brute. Big, ugly, and intimidating, the capture of such a trophy was the clear pinnacle of our purpose and when it happened, it meant the end of crab fishing for that day.

This event occasioned a bicycle parade around the neighborhood. The captive behemoth lead the way in David Richter's bike basket, his being the only one big enough to contain it. Also, his bicycle sounded the most dangerous due to the playing card wedged in the spokes. We treated hapless neighborhood residents to the spectacle of our treasure and the attendant capture information. Only when we ran out of audience and the turtle began to wilt from the heat, did we proceed to David's house. There his mom would circumspectly extricate the thing from his bicycle and make soup with it.

Those were days in a time before moonwalks and Mario Brothers. Then our phone number at 28 Howard Avenue was 3663 and when I lifted the receiver, instead of a dial tone an operator primly said, "Number, please?" No one in the neighborhood had heard of television, much less seen one. The milkman delivered fresh milk to our house in glass bottles with paper stoppers labeled "Luxerin Farms" and the letter carrier made twice-daily deliveries Monday through Saturday.

It was a time when we knew the neighbors for blocks around and they too knew us. Unless it rained, I was out of the house from sunup 'til after dark and we roamed freely without fear of harm. I enjoyed this life for several years until my parents purchased a home in a different part of town. When we moved, I lost touch with the Greenwood Street gang. I still think of them fondly and of the halcyon days spent together under the 12th Street Bridge in my hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.