grabbed, we had a free-for-all and I finally got his head and mine above the surface. The water was only five feet or so deep in the backwater but Harold felt like he was stuck in the mud.
The hip boots! They were filled with water.
“Kick the boots off!” I yelled, holding him from the rear with one arm around his neck.
“You’re … choking … me.”
“Kick the boots off!”
I let him go and he untied and kicked free of one boot, then the other, and we made the shore, where we lay side by side gasping.
“What,” Harold said, “was
that
?”
I looked at the vest where the reel had literally ripped loose. Those old rods were made of high-test steel; they would bend but they never broke,not even when they pulled a person into the water.
I’d heard stories of fish like the one that came through. In the old days, they said, sturgeon were huge, so big it took a team of horses to pull them up onto the bank when they were hooked. Hundreds of pounds they weighed, as old as dinosaurs, primitive, ugly, enormous. People said that when they died they didn’t come up but lay on the bottom and sank into the mud and just disappeared. I had never seen one. I would never see one, not in my whole life.
“Do you know what it was?”
The reel caught in Harold’s vest had dragged him in and if it hadn’t torn loose he would have ended up in the river proper, where the depth dropped to fifteen or twenty feet. The boots would have dragged him down and nothing I could have done would have helped. He would be dead now. Dead down in the mud with that … that thing. Gone.
“What
was
it?”
But I lay back on the warm bank and closed my eyes and didn’t answer, felt the sun dry my body and clothes and thought how much better Harold was alive than he would be dead. He was my friend. I knew that now because of therelief, and I lay in the sun and didn’t think of the two rods gone or how big the fish must have been and I didn’t answer Harold then or ever; just lay in the sun and felt how good it was to be alive.
7. On the Nature of Wealth
A fool and his golf balls are soon parted
.
—H AROLD ON BECOMING RICH
I’m not sure just when we decided to get rich but I have a good idea. I’d spent most of my life working at whatever jobs I could get—selling newspapers to drunks, setting pins in the bowling alley, working on farms in the summer for a dollar a day—so I knew about work. In fact I felt as if I knew way more than I wanted to know about it, and the idea of being wealthy—so I would not have to work sixteen-hour days for a dollar a day and my keep—was beautiful to me.
Harold, on the other hand, had a less strenuouslife. He wasn’t lazy and was willing to work, but his father had a good job and didn’t drink, and Harold had a room and three meals a day, and his parents bought all his clothes. I thought he lived in luxury.
His room was upstairs and had a dormer with a window looking out over the backyard. We were sitting in the dormer, where he had a table that held his transmitter and receiver. It was evening, just after dark, and Harold was trying to talk to somebody in Russia but kept getting a man in New York.
Harold was an amateur radio operator—a ham—and we spent many hours talking in Morse code to people all over the world. Back then code transmission was all we could afford. Or rather Harold talked and I watched and listened, amazed at how it all worked. I could not believe how he could have made the little Heathkit forty-watt transmitter from a kit, soldered wires and vacuum tube sockets and resistors and condensers and coils in a device that would allow us to hear—through whistles and hums and squawks—the little beeps and dit-dahs of people all around the world.
It had so impressed me that I’d made a small oscillator—with Harold’s help—that emitted asqueal into a headset when it was keyed. I was trying to learn Morse code so I could become a ham as well, tapping away on an
The hip boots! They were filled with water.
“Kick the boots off!” I yelled, holding him from the rear with one arm around his neck.
“You’re … choking … me.”
“Kick the boots off!”
I let him go and he untied and kicked free of one boot, then the other, and we made the shore, where we lay side by side gasping.
“What,” Harold said, “was
that
?”
I looked at the vest where the reel had literally ripped loose. Those old rods were made of high-test steel; they would bend but they never broke,not even when they pulled a person into the water.
I’d heard stories of fish like the one that came through. In the old days, they said, sturgeon were huge, so big it took a team of horses to pull them up onto the bank when they were hooked. Hundreds of pounds they weighed, as old as dinosaurs, primitive, ugly, enormous. People said that when they died they didn’t come up but lay on the bottom and sank into the mud and just disappeared. I had never seen one. I would never see one, not in my whole life.
“Do you know what it was?”
The reel caught in Harold’s vest had dragged him in and if it hadn’t torn loose he would have ended up in the river proper, where the depth dropped to fifteen or twenty feet. The boots would have dragged him down and nothing I could have done would have helped. He would be dead now. Dead down in the mud with that … that thing. Gone.
“What
was
it?”
But I lay back on the warm bank and closed my eyes and didn’t answer, felt the sun dry my body and clothes and thought how much better Harold was alive than he would be dead. He was my friend. I knew that now because of therelief, and I lay in the sun and didn’t think of the two rods gone or how big the fish must have been and I didn’t answer Harold then or ever; just lay in the sun and felt how good it was to be alive.
7. On the Nature of Wealth
A fool and his golf balls are soon parted
.
—H AROLD ON BECOMING RICH
I’m not sure just when we decided to get rich but I have a good idea. I’d spent most of my life working at whatever jobs I could get—selling newspapers to drunks, setting pins in the bowling alley, working on farms in the summer for a dollar a day—so I knew about work. In fact I felt as if I knew way more than I wanted to know about it, and the idea of being wealthy—so I would not have to work sixteen-hour days for a dollar a day and my keep—was beautiful to me.
Harold, on the other hand, had a less strenuouslife. He wasn’t lazy and was willing to work, but his father had a good job and didn’t drink, and Harold had a room and three meals a day, and his parents bought all his clothes. I thought he lived in luxury.
His room was upstairs and had a dormer with a window looking out over the backyard. We were sitting in the dormer, where he had a table that held his transmitter and receiver. It was evening, just after dark, and Harold was trying to talk to somebody in Russia but kept getting a man in New York.
Harold was an amateur radio operator—a ham—and we spent many hours talking in Morse code to people all over the world. Back then code transmission was all we could afford. Or rather Harold talked and I watched and listened, amazed at how it all worked. I could not believe how he could have made the little Heathkit forty-watt transmitter from a kit, soldered wires and vacuum tube sockets and resistors and condensers and coils in a device that would allow us to hear—through whistles and hums and squawks—the little beeps and dit-dahs of people all around the world.
It had so impressed me that I’d made a small oscillator—with Harold’s help—that emitted asqueal into a headset when it was keyed. I was trying to learn Morse code so I could become a ham as well, tapping away on an
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