for years, for fears

aligator gar

I thought a gar bit me once while I was climbing the ladder to our dock on Turkey Creek. I immediately reacted to the sudden sting and quickly jumped onto the wooden platform to check my leg. I was bleeding and freaked out. Later that day, my first cousin by marriage, Ray, found the gar, dead, twisted to the ladder by fishing wire, punctured by an angler's hook. I remember walking over the little bridge attached to our dock and seeing him throwing something towards the cove with a cave side of our swimming area whilst simultaneously receiving news of what really happened to me earlier in the day at the ladder. It disturbed me that Ray would throw the fish of projected evil right where we swam. We surmised that the hook cut me and not the gar, which was way smaller than the one in the above picture and probably not the aligator kind. For years, I would purposely float my legs upward avoiding the rung of the mossy ladder where I felt the pain of the hook.