06-20-00
Roughly seven years ago, I checked out The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion from the library. Shortly thereafter, my friend Alexis helped me pack up my belongings and move to a new apartment. She packed the library books into that box that travels with you from place to place and never seems to empty, or live anywhere but the back of the storage locker.
I will go through spells where I voraciously attack libraries like a plague of locusts, devouring everything within. And then the drought comes, and I don't pick up a book for years. This move heralded a new job and beauty school, not leaving me a lot of time to read, so I didn't go to the library. And it took the library a good 6 months to track me down, wanting over $120 for the cost of the two books plus assorted penalties. I searched for them to no avail, and it wasn't until I moved to this apartment building, five years ago, that I found those missing tomes, and promptly returned them to the library. Of course, I wasn't about ready to pay the fines, so until now, I have avoided that place like a different sort of plague.
Guess who finally disappeared from the library's radar?
I am reading Savage Shore, Life and Death with Nacaragua's Last Shark Hunters, by Edward Marriott. Marriott went to the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua to study and track the bull shark, as well as to document the lives of the people who depend upon the shark as a source of income and legend. This book fits tightly into the genre of "travel book," I suppose taking its place with many others of its kind. It is scary and informative and saddening and dry.
The bull shark haunts the Nicaraguan coastline, as well as in the freshwater lakes and rivers that snake down to the ocean. At one point in the book, a woman told Marriott the story of how she and her friend Gloria were slaughtering a pig in the shallows of the river, in preparation for a party. Suddenly, a large crash in the water in front of them occurred, and Gloria was dragged under, never to be seen again. "What a terrible thing to witness," Marriott told her.
"Yes," she replied, focusing on a handkerchief in her lap. "It quite spoiled the party."
Almost as much as finding out that Carol pussied up and didn't fire Mari. And has no plans to anytime soon.
