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Micah's Full Interview - 8

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Category: Micah's Full Interview

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I don’t know. I could talk a lot about the whole thing. It was pretty amazing. It was amazing because it felt like—it was kind of like a Little House on the Prairie kind of thing, where the memories feel like a good book, just the memories feel like a good book. That was—I guess it’s important to maybe live your life like that, so no matter what you’re doing, your memories will be like a good book. Because that’s really what you’ve got when you look back.

I love talking about it. I think we’ve covered a lot. I ramble so much, I’m sorry, you probably had things you wanted to ask me and were waiting for me to finish up. I do that all the time. I start out on a thought, and then it just keeps going in my mind, so it keeps going in my mouth, and I don’t know when to shut up.

I think that was good. Snug Harbor is right there. [Points to map]. That’s where we had the houseboat. We bought it on this side of the island. Way up there is where we’d drive down here to. We bought it there, and it took forever to tow it. We had to go all the way around. We finally ended up here. This little bay here is a blow hole. We had, like, the crappiest winter of my life there one year. We couldn’t get it all the way to here because a storm blew in, and once we got the anchors down there, we said, “Well, let’s just spend the winter here and see how it is.” Terrible. We shrimped all through here. And before I got to be old enough to do this with my mom and my brother, my dad had shrimped all over the Sound at that point, and he found this little spot there.

We had just gone back to Snug Harbor this summer for the first time since I was 10 or 11 years old, just after the oil spill. It was interesting to go back to that spot and go, “Wow, that beach is a lot longer than I remember it. It’s a half mile long. I just remember it being the beach.” The mountains were just incredible. I just remember them being the mountains. I’d take a kite and hook it onto our jigging pole and put as much line on it, like a hell of a jigging rod, and the wind is always going there, whether it’s coming off the mountain or in from the Gulf. I’d release the line and send the kite up as high as it could go until it’s at the last few ratchets and you could barely see the kite, it was way up and sloped way out from the weight of the line. I’d wonder if it was as high as the mountains were there, because it was so high, just thousands of feet up there. It was kind of cool.

Or the echo. My mom played a trick on me, a lot of tricks, and you forget to tell a kid that you’re only joking. I’d yell, “Hello!” The mountains are very big on that island, they produce an echo from a long ways away. I’d hear, “Hello!” “There’s a kid over there!” She’d go, “Yeah, that’s the kid in the next bay.” And it’s just one of those things, I always thought there was this kid yelling back at me, so I’d go, “Hey, how’s it going?” “Hey, how’s it going?” Little things like that. [laughs] It’s pretty funny. I’m going, “OK, there’s not a kid over in the next bay, what’s going on?” It was fun. There’s all kinds of little stuff. When I went back there, it was definitely—when we’d drive out of the bay in the morning, we’d go pick the shrimp box every morning, it was right there in the sunrise, no sense getting up before the sun and risking hitting a log in the dark, and so we’d get the boat fired up at sunrise. It was probably because I didn’t want to wake up any earlier, too. I’m sure that nowadays you would probably get up well before sunrise, just to make better time. We’d be met by a pod of porpoises, the same pod, there was 10 or 15 of them, and they were waiting. They would circle out at Discovery Point, they’d wait for the boat, and they’d come flying at the boat. They’d be doing that little lazy thing that they do when they’re sleeping, not using energy. We’d see them there. And they’d hear the boat and they were just all of a sudden—they’d just start charging at us, come right for us. They’d disappear under the boat and pop up on the bow and they’d ride out and spend hours on our bow wave. It was cool. They’d roll on their sides and look up with their eyes. They never took any herring out of—well, maybe they took a chunk of herring out of my mom’s hand directly once. We were always trying to feed them, but they were like, “Drop it first. I’m not taking it, just drop it.” So we’d play with them, and then we’d drop it then they went, bam! and they’d hit it really fast. You could drag your hand in the water and they would come up and touch your hand with their head, right by their blowhole, they’d put their head up and be kicking ferociously, because Mike’s going seven and a half knots in the boat, and they’re pumping their tails, and they’d see you and creep up next to the boat, you’d put the hand down, they’d put their little bell-shaped head and let you touch them. Pretty special.

That was a unique life. I really got lucky with that one. There’s a lot of people that have a lot of unique lives. I’m really grateful. There’s a lot of things I don’t even think I can remember, because I was out there when I was four or five years old. Who knows what was happening then? I can only really remember when I was eight, nine, and ten, and then all through my teenage years when I spent on the gill-netter and the crazy, wild, terrible things I had to experience growing up on a boat when I was older, they’re all very vivid, but before the oil spill, when I was young and things were magical, that “Oh, my gosh, wow!” stage of life, that was a really cool thing to do. And if I ever have kids, it’ll be really important for me to, during that same time period where the human development, the social skills, reading and writing, are all coming into play, definitely value that sense of family adventure, a family on an adventure. It’s very important. Friends and family really close together. We still function really tight. It’s a good feeling. I think that’s a good remedy for some of the disassociated families that happen today, that communication doesn’t happen between family, kids run off when they’re 13, 14 years old and hate their parents. Things happen to all families. But I think that I am definitely—I have so many good memories of that system that I feel like that would be something I’d like to try for sure, and I’d like to advocate as well, definitely. Between that and the therapy and the wonderful feelings of letting yourself just do the wild thing in the woods, I think that’s pretty good medicine, a lasting trend that I want to keep.

Maybe I’ll be a farmer and the kids can help me out. I hear farmers need lots of kids, too.