Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing the world's most degraded rivers, just the two of us…I was pretty sure it was going to
be more romantic than it sounded.
There was a tug on the line. I did as Nelson had taught: I pulled up sharply on the rod
to set the hook—and waited. “You feel something again after that, you've got a fish,” he'd
said. But so far the tugs on my line had signified only that my hooks were now empty of
bait.
But this time there was another tug on the line, and another—an irregular rhythm drum-
ming against the rod and reel. I started reeling, and like magic, two large fish appeared in
the water.
Two.
Nelson threw down his rod, whooping. “Pull him in!” he cried. “Pull him in! You got
two!”
I pulled and reeled and yanked the fish toward the bank, where Nelson grabbed the line
and pulled them out of the rainbow-stained water, beaming at my success. The fish hung
from the line, exhausted and gaping, each of them a good sixteen inches long. They were
the largest fish I had ever caught. Larger, perhaps, than any fish ever caught in the history
of the world.
“That's called drum,” Nelson said.
Drum.
I had caught oily drum. He slapped his leg.
“That's going to cook up real good!”
Rhonda was on the phone. They were about to release the pelican. Over the line, I could
hear her teeth grinding. She hadn't wanted to make the call, but I had put in a request with
the Coast Guard to ask her to.
She sounded hopeful that I wouldn't be able to make it, and gave me only very vague
directions. Her team was already on the road, she said. It was probably too late for me to
find them.
But if she thought she could hide this pelican release from the world, she was mistaken.
I sped across town, crossed an imposing cable-stayed bridge over the northeast elbow of
the ship channel, and then doubled back to the south. Pavement turned to gravel, and the
road plunged into a wetland park, stands of grass interlaced by channels of placid water. To
the west, the horizon was decorated with the distant skyline of the refineries, tiny thickets
of smokestacks and fractionating columns.
Driving south, I passed the occasional clot of trash—a shattered television on the
shoulder, a pink recliner submerged to its forehead in a placid side channel. Cormorants
