her down spells, would obligingly scale, clean, pan-fry, and serve them up for dinner, typically with cornbread, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and her highest compliment: “Right nice.”
—Summertime swimming , not in narrow and workboat-busy Avon Creek, but in the wider, relatively cleaner Matahannock River, off a stretch of public sand-mud-andmarshgrass “beach” above the point where creek joins river, just downstream from the larger bridge connecting Stratford proper to the neighboring county. More bathing and aquatic horseplay than actual swimming, supervised in their early grade-school years by Mrs. Prosper or a mother of one of Ruthie’s friends, later by Ruth herself, more or less, in her Big Sister capacity, and on the boys’ own from about age ten, by when the neighborhood deemed its kids capable of trekking unsupervised to and from the rivershore as they did to Bridgetown Elementary, and disporting themselves harmlessly through a sultry tidewater afternoon. No diving from the bridge : a posted prohibition routinely ignored by the older boys. Don’t swim out farther than you can swim back : a rather self-enforcing rule; and Stay out of the main channel : a more negotiable one, since work- and pleasure-boat traffic was lighter on that upstream stretch of river than on Avon Creek and the lower Matahannock, with its numerous other creeks, boatyards, and crab-and-oyster-processing establishments. For these particular pre-teens, however, crawlstroking out to the river’s channel would have bent, and perhaps even broken, the preceding rule. Watch out for skates and sea
nettles : the former (a.k.a. sting rays) fortunately not numerous, and generally avoidable if one remembered to shuffle one’s feet when walking on the firm mud/sand bottom (all but invisible in more than knee-deep water), but most unpleasant to be “stung” by—as witness Captain John Smith’s near-fatal encounter with one off consequently-named Sting Ray Point on the lower Chesapeake during his first exploration of the Bay in 1608. The latter the less formidable though distinctly unpleasant medusa jellyfish Chrysaora quinquecirrha , so abundant in dry summers especially (when the brackish water becomes saltier) as to be all but unavoidable except by staying ashore.
Which, when the nettles were plentiful, the girls inclined to do, especially as they approached adolescence: a cooling dip now and then in the shallows just offshore, where they could more likely avoid being stung; then back to the more-or-less-sandy “beach” to play in its “sand” (not to be compared to the fine Atlantic beaches several hours distant, which the Prospers visited maybe twice per summer with “Gee” sometimes in tow), or merely stretch out on a towel like the older girls, gossip, leaf through magazines, and acquire a tan (more often a red, since only those older girls sometimes applied sun lotions, and SPF numbers weren’t invented yet). Fair-skinned boys simply blistered, peeled, and got the bill some decades later in the form of actinic keratoses, basal-cell epitheliomas, sometimes even dangerous melanomas. Kids from Stratford/Bridgetown’s Negro ward were luckier, Mrs. Prosper once observed, with respect to sunburn if little else. But one didn’t know any of them personally;
they had their own small schoolhouse on the far side of town, and their own swimming-place somewhere down near the mouth of Avon Creek. To Ned and Gee and the other boys, the nettles were normally no more than a minor nuisance: In the water as much as the girls were out of it, the fellows romped and splashed one another, played Tag and Submarine, dived off the concrete bridge-piers and, as they got older, illicitly off the bridge itself—even swam a bit in the course of their horseplay, instructed by one another or the occasional parent. Their inevitable, more or less severe jellyfish stings (picric acid burns, actually, Mr. Prosper explained) they accepted like the skinned knees
—Summertime swimming , not in narrow and workboat-busy Avon Creek, but in the wider, relatively cleaner Matahannock River, off a stretch of public sand-mud-andmarshgrass “beach” above the point where creek joins river, just downstream from the larger bridge connecting Stratford proper to the neighboring county. More bathing and aquatic horseplay than actual swimming, supervised in their early grade-school years by Mrs. Prosper or a mother of one of Ruthie’s friends, later by Ruth herself, more or less, in her Big Sister capacity, and on the boys’ own from about age ten, by when the neighborhood deemed its kids capable of trekking unsupervised to and from the rivershore as they did to Bridgetown Elementary, and disporting themselves harmlessly through a sultry tidewater afternoon. No diving from the bridge : a posted prohibition routinely ignored by the older boys. Don’t swim out farther than you can swim back : a rather self-enforcing rule; and Stay out of the main channel : a more negotiable one, since work- and pleasure-boat traffic was lighter on that upstream stretch of river than on Avon Creek and the lower Matahannock, with its numerous other creeks, boatyards, and crab-and-oyster-processing establishments. For these particular pre-teens, however, crawlstroking out to the river’s channel would have bent, and perhaps even broken, the preceding rule. Watch out for skates and sea
nettles : the former (a.k.a. sting rays) fortunately not numerous, and generally avoidable if one remembered to shuffle one’s feet when walking on the firm mud/sand bottom (all but invisible in more than knee-deep water), but most unpleasant to be “stung” by—as witness Captain John Smith’s near-fatal encounter with one off consequently-named Sting Ray Point on the lower Chesapeake during his first exploration of the Bay in 1608. The latter the less formidable though distinctly unpleasant medusa jellyfish Chrysaora quinquecirrha , so abundant in dry summers especially (when the brackish water becomes saltier) as to be all but unavoidable except by staying ashore.
Which, when the nettles were plentiful, the girls inclined to do, especially as they approached adolescence: a cooling dip now and then in the shallows just offshore, where they could more likely avoid being stung; then back to the more-or-less-sandy “beach” to play in its “sand” (not to be compared to the fine Atlantic beaches several hours distant, which the Prospers visited maybe twice per summer with “Gee” sometimes in tow), or merely stretch out on a towel like the older girls, gossip, leaf through magazines, and acquire a tan (more often a red, since only those older girls sometimes applied sun lotions, and SPF numbers weren’t invented yet). Fair-skinned boys simply blistered, peeled, and got the bill some decades later in the form of actinic keratoses, basal-cell epitheliomas, sometimes even dangerous melanomas. Kids from Stratford/Bridgetown’s Negro ward were luckier, Mrs. Prosper once observed, with respect to sunburn if little else. But one didn’t know any of them personally;
they had their own small schoolhouse on the far side of town, and their own swimming-place somewhere down near the mouth of Avon Creek. To Ned and Gee and the other boys, the nettles were normally no more than a minor nuisance: In the water as much as the girls were out of it, the fellows romped and splashed one another, played Tag and Submarine, dived off the concrete bridge-piers and, as they got older, illicitly off the bridge itself—even swam a bit in the course of their horseplay, instructed by one another or the occasional parent. Their inevitable, more or less severe jellyfish stings (picric acid burns, actually, Mr. Prosper explained) they accepted like the skinned knees
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