Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Sting Ray

Sting Ray

Labor Day, 2006

A story in the news today reminded me of something I haven’t thought about in many years. Steven Irvin, the Australian “Crocodile Hunter” was killed today when a sting ray barbed him in the chest. At first this seemed like a very rate, freakish accident. And then I remembered that my own Dad was once “stung” by a stingray. Not during my lifetime, but when he was a boy, or maybe a young man. Before he married my mother, anyway. But it was a big enough deal to still be talked about in the family during my childhood.

“Remember when Joe got stung by a stingray?” someone would ask at a family gathering. The uncles would be sitting on the porch railing, the aunts in the metal porch chairs—rusted and in danger of sinking so low that they threatened to snap from metal fatigue—and we cousins would be bunched up on the porch steps.

“Lord, yes, I remember it well,” my father’d say.
“I guess so,” my grandmother would say, “you didn’t walk for weeks.”
“Where’d it sting you, Uncle Joe?” my cousin Debby would ask.
“Right here behind my ankle. The barb went clean through and come out the other side. I’ve still got the scars.” He’d push down his sock and hike up his pants leg and we kids could plainly see the two round reddish scars behind his right ankle, one on each side.

“Did it hurt, Uncle Joe?”

“Did it hurt? It was bad enough when they cut the barb off and pulled it on through my ankle. But then they held me down and poured a whole bottle of iodine in the hole it made.”

We never asked any more questions after that, so I don’t know who “they” were or how my father came to get hurt by a stingray.

My mother, re-telling the story in later years, would say that Daddy was standing in the river, pulling fishing nets toward the boat when he stepped on the ray. I do know that Daddy taught my sister and me to use the “stingray shuffle” in the water at the beach, so we’d never step directly on top on a stingray.

I also remember that, when during my childhood, Theo Davis, another commercial fisherman, got stung in the calf of his leg by a stingray, Daddy said Theo cried. Theo had to go to the hospital to have the barb cut out of his leg, because it you pull it back out, the backward-facing small barbs along the edge of the stinger will tear up your flesh, plus there’s some sort of venom in the stinger. Theo couldn’t walk for weeks, either.

Why this didn’t scare me more, I don’t know. But I think that, to this day, I never really realized nor appreciated how dangerous a commercial fisherman’s life could be. I guess this is true of any occupation that puts you “up close and personal” with Mother Nature and her offspring. Things like farming and fishing and logging and exploring new territory, like astronauts and frontiersmen.

When I start making a list, I can remember hearing about many close shaves my father had in his work, like the time a whale surface under his boat. But that’s another story.