Sticky Situations
Redneck rivers, Lone Star lawlessness, and illicit island crab claws
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: situations that could have gone very wrong, very quickly.
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Ingredient List
🎵 : It’s killing me to say this, but after seeing this depressing faux-Phoebe Bridgers/Conor Oberst cover of “Margaritaville” on Instagram, I’m now trying to convince myself that Jimmy Buffett was a legitimately great songwriter. I’m doing my best to enter my yacht rock era, but I’m not sure that boat has left the dock yet. Though I’ve found that I really do love his song “Biloxi,” and “Come Monday” has always been solid.
📖 : Mostly just magazine reading this week. The newest edition of Wildsam, an American travel magazine that speaks to my love of the open road. Also, this month’s Esquire, especially this ode (and recipe) to the amaro shakerato by food editor Kevin Sintumuang. After reading it, I’m kicking myself for not ordering a shakerato when I was in Italy. Like Fievel going west, I guess I’ll just have to make it in America.
This Past Week
Apparently, summer is here in Baltimore, with almost a full week of temperatures in the 80s. On Thursday night, I had a wonderful trip on the free water taxi as I took my oldest son to his baseball practice across the water. The return trip as the sun was setting was flawless, and it was nice chatting with the other riders on the way back to Fells Point. One of those evenings that really fills your heart up with Baltimore pride. In the same way, I got to see the Orioles beat the Yankees on Monday night, which was almost as beautiful as the weather we had for the game.
Other things I wrote this week:
“How Diadora is Reinventing Itself in Running” for Believe in the Run
“Adidas Athletes Set 12 Records at the 2024 Road To Records Event” for Believe in the Run
“New Balance Launches Annual Grey Days Event for 2024” for Believe in the Run
And now, onto the dinner service.
Course 1
A Word of Gratitude: Stone Crab Claws
A couple years ago I was in the Bahamas with some friends as we were celebrating both my wife’s birthday and my best friend’s wife’s birthday, who both turned 40 on the same day. We stayed on an outer island called Eleuthera, a skinny strip of land that acts as a demarcation line between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. At the time, it was still largely undeveloped from top to bottom; it still is, except for the once-pristine and beautiful Lighthouse Beach, which Disney just turned into a cruise port.
We made the mistake of going during the off season, which was great for lodging prices and having entire coastlines to ourselves, but not so great in that everything was mostly shut down. Including most industry, apparently. All we wanted was some fresh seafood, and it was seemingly nowhere. Fishies, fishies everywhere, and not a fish in sight.
On our last day, still desperate for food that wasn’t from the bodega around the corner, we drove over to the other side of Governor’s Harbor to buy yet another $50 case of Kalik beer, which is essentially an even cheaper-tasting version of Amstel Light. While my friends went into the bar, I struck up a conversation with a random guy standing outside. I don’t remember his actual name, but I’ll call him Samson for the purposes of this story.
Roughly one minute into our conversation, Samson offered to sell me marijuana and other forms of contraband, which possibly included women. I told him we were good on those, but what I really needed was some seafood. Yes, he said, I can get you that: stone crab claws, $100 for a large bag. For an island that had nothing, this man really had everything.
I told him I’d think about it and that we’d be back within an hour if we decided to take him up on his offer. He gave me directions to his house: go down that dirt road, past the market, second house on the left. We really didn’t need stone crab claws, but once we were back at the house, the prospect of it and the adventure of procuring them kept itching at me. I convinced my friends to do it, so we got in the car and went back.
Finding Samson’s house was an adventure, even though it didn’t have to be. That area of town, as with most areas of the island, was pretty simple. The houses were low slung white boxes in square plots next to each other, often with women or children sitting outside. We initially did walk past his house, but there was a dog out front, so we kept moving. We knocked on a different door– wrong house. We wandered around, past women sitting in plastic deck chairs in a dirt yard. We asked them if they knew him, fully aware that they all knew these four white Americans were there to buy illicit goods. I wanted to say: “We just want crab claws, I swear!” Either way, they were nice enough to direct us to the proper place. We knocked on the door, and Samson came to the door, shirtless and pulling up his pants as he stepped outside. We had clearly just woken him up, but he told us to follow him.
We did, expecting to walk a block or so to the store with crab claws. As we walked down the street, he abruptly stopped at the rear passenger door of our car.
“Let’s go,” he said. We had to drive there? This was part of the adventure that we did not expect. “Yes, get in.” We came this far, we couldn’t quit now. We did get in, and he did too.
From there, we drove this way and that through town, before we finally arrived at either a half-built or half-destroyed concrete structure. It was hard to tell which.
“Just wait here,” he said, as he left to talk to some guys standing outside. A couple minutes later, he returned. “Okay, let’s go.”
We followed him to the doorway of the structure, where two men stood on either side of the doorway. We gave them a little head nod, as if we had some brotherhood bond that spanned from Maryland to Eleuthera, from one friend who was a doctor to a dude guarding a place that sold illicit stone crab claws for a living.
We walked into the windowless structure where a few more guys stood around, watching us like the exotic zoo animals that we were. Right away, we noticed two things, since they were the only two things in the wide-open building: a toilet in the middle of the structure and a large chest freezer in the back corner. I only had an interest in one of those, and Samson led us back there.
A man stood at the freezer and opened it up, and sure enough, against all odds– there were about 10 large bags of stone crab claws inside. Let me repeat– this freezer was the only thing in the entire building.
“How much?” I asked the man.
“One hundred dollars,” he said.
Two hours ago when this whole saga started, my initial intent was to bargain my way down on the stone crab valuation. I had only brought $50 with me, assuming I could either haggle down to that price, or take a lesser quantity of claws. It was apparent that neither of those things were happening. I asked my friends if they had any cash on them, and one of them pulled out an entire roll of cash, a few hundred dollars at least. My spidey-sense was going haywire, and I tried not to make eye contact with anyone in the room.
We gave the guardian of the crab claws his money, said thank you in our best non-narc way, grabbed our bag o’ claws, kept our heads down, and got out of there as fast as possible.
On the ride back into town, Samson shook us down for another $15. He said it was for liquor, but we said we’d buy it for him, knowing it was way cheaper than that.
“What, you don’t trust me?” he said, the temperature in his voice rising. Bold question from a guy standing outside a dive bar selling drugs, hookers, and underground seafood.
In his defense, he said he could get us stone crab claws, and he was a man of his word.
We gave him the money.
And for that (the stone crab claws), I am thankful.
Course 2
Appetizer: Safety Orange
Growing up, it was pretty normal to play with guns. It was the ‘90s, after all. I mean, the Gulf War had freaking trading cards. I still have a mint Norman Schwarzkopf card somewhere, waiting for the next armed conflict to peak in value. If you really want to know how normal it was to play with guns, ask any 40-years-or-older man to make a machine gun noise and they’ll do it on the spot. I have yet to meet a woman who can do it. It’s not even sexist, it’s just true.
While I did have a Crosman BB gun and would sometimes shoot my grandpa’s .22, I’m talking about toy guns in this context, specifically a black plastic handgun that was a pretty good 9mm replica from far away. Especially since I spray painted over the safety orange part on the end of the barrel. Apparently, you can be too safe and I wasn’t having it.
One summer night, my younger sister had some friends over for a sleepover, and my friends and I were playing cops and robbers with them, whether they wanted to or not. I think it was more like robbers versus hostages. We were at the park across the street from my parents’ house, it was dark outside, and we were being loud. This was generally fine as there were very few neighbors where we lived. On this night, however, one of those neighbors decided it was enough.
Maybe we were too loud, maybe they saw me from afar, pointing a gun at my sister’s head.
Taking a break from chasing middle school girls, my friends and I went up to the doors of the township offices at the top of the park, where I was standing on an ashtray can, catching bugs and feeding them to spiders. (Look, we lived in the country– watching spiders spin up mayflies for dinner was high excitement.)
In the middle of playing chef to a family of arachnids, I saw red and blue lights pull into the parking lot and drive up to where we were hanging out. We didn’t have a police department where I grew up, so it was undoubtedly the Pennsylvania State Police, who were always way too serious and were unequivocally never cool. Two officers got out and asked us what we were doing. I told them I was feeding spiders. Dumb, but true.
I also forgot I had a black handgun tucked in the front waistband of my shorts.
Before I knew what was happening, one of the officers reached quickly towards me and pulled the gun out of my waistband before throwing it on the ground and stomping on it repeatedly with his black police boots. He yelled at me: “Do you know how many people are killed by guns each year?”
I answered snarkily, “It’s not even a real gun.”
He yelled again, “Do you know how many people are killed by guns each year?”
I told him I didn’t, he yelled at me again and told us to get out of there. Like a smartass, I asked him for my gun back, he yelled no and told us to get out again. So we did, but man, we thought, what an overreaction.
The thing is, I was a white kid in the country and he was a Black police officer on patrol, possibly for a call about a kid chasing people with a gun. Technically, I was armed and he was too.
Decades later, I realized that– had our roles and races been reversed– there was a good chance that the kid with the gun in his waistband could’ve been one of the people killed by guns each year.
And I still wouldn’t know the answer.
Course 3
The Main: Red Hot Chili Peppers
For some reason, I always seemed to be in Texas in August. Or, if I were there in the winter, it was never a break from the Northeast. I thought I paid for sun and oppressive heat, but instead I got snow.
But this summer, we were on the road playing music and we really were there in August. It was a half-baked tour, which is exactly what comes out of the EasyBake oven when you rely on another band to help book a tour through Myspace.
We were on tour with a band called Motion Commotion from Brooklyn– it would end up being both their first and last tour, as the malaise of empty rooms and the ever-brewing internal dissension took hold of whatever morale was there in the beginning. We didn’t get the hint, persisting for years longer.
Around the halfway mark of the tour, we were playing a show in Dallas. I don’t remember the venue, I just know it was an area with a lot of bars and drunk people, including ourselves. It was also oppressively hot, the kind of hot where you question if the sun actually went down or a curtain was just placed in front of it.
We finished our show and were loading out all our gear to pack into our double axle trailer pulled by our 15-passenger Ford. Since it was kind of a crowded sidewalk, we lined up our gear along the van. Marc, our drummer, had yet to pack up his drums so they were sitting on top of his cases while our lead singer Luke started packing things into the trailer. I walked out of the venue to help, and as I walked up the sidewalk, a group of three guys were coming towards us, quite loud and obnoxious, two of them barely holding up their one friend who was even more drunk than they were.
As they walked past, I stared them down and they gave me a “what are you looking at” type of look. I kept going, and so did they, until they reached the front of our van, at which point the one who could barely walk grabbed the antenna on our van and started trying to bend it. Marc was close by and told them to stop fucking with the van, which to them was a totally unreasonable response to someone who was indeed fucking with the van.
For the very drunk guy, that meant war. So he wound up and kicked Marc’s rack tom straight off its case and onto the sidewalk. Now, this wasn’t just a Guitar Center kit that sounded like Home Depot buckets in an underwater concerto. Marc had a custom-made kit from C&C, a Kansas City company that has built handcrafted kits for everyone from Modest Mouse to The National to Arcade Fire. A deep purple kit with pink accents, embedded with abalone inlays. It looked beautiful and sounded gorgeous. It was Marc’s most cherished possession.
So yeah, kicking that kit did mean war.
From twenty feet away, I saw Marc grab the kick drum guy (pun intended) and throw him into the van, at which point a combination of liquid courage, brotherhood, and the lawless air of Texas took hold. Fists were already flying as I jumped into the fray.
I never had an older brother, but for some reason I always loved to fight before flight, even though it mostly involved fistfights with friends in middle school and backyard boxing with friends in high school. I was landing punches wherever I could, which was mostly nowhere as it was complete chaos. Some of us were fighting, while others– like our guitarist Tim and our merch guy Josh– were trying to break up the fight. Tim’s a therapist now, so that makes sense. I took a good shot to the mouth that cut my lip, and who knows how long this would’ve went on if it weren’t for what happened next.
Unbeknownst to us, there was a security detail of Dallas police standing outside the bar down the street. Within seconds, they ran down, making no attempt to break up the fight before going full riot mode on the kids in skinny jeans. Because the next thing I knew, I was on the ground with absolute fire in my eyes. Since I was the closest to them at the time, I had apparently turned around just when they arrived, resulting in a full blast of pepper spray straight to the face. When I say full blast, I mean pretty much the whole thing, straight from the can, a foot away. I was the only person on the ground, writhing in pain, unable to open my eyes as the searing heat took hold.
If you’ve never experienced this (and you probably haven’t), it is one of the worst pains, not because of the initial intensity, but because it just doesn’t subside, despite all your best efforts. You may have cut jalapeños then touched your eye by accident. Imagine that feeling, but amplified 50 times, both eyes and your entire face and your arms, and it doesn’t even start to relent for at least the first hour. No matter how much water you dump in your eyes, it just keeps burning. It will also come back and haunt you for days to come, as a layer of it will cover everything in a ten-foot radius– all our gear and van seats and steering wheel– seemingly everything we owned.
Fortunately, the bar let us back in and kept feeding me cups of water for my eyes, which was a slight relief each time but mostly pointless. Around 1 a.m. they basically kicked us out. I could semi open my eyes at that point, but going to the bathroom was interesting because I had to do it without touching anything.
And that was just the first part of the night.
We needed a place to stay, and one of the guys from Motion Commotion had a relative that lived in the area. We found the place (this was 2006 so we were still using a world atlas, by the way), we rolled in and were immediately greeted by a twelve-year-old kid drinking a beer. Honestly, I didn’t care if the kid was shooting black tar heroin at that point– a place to stay is a place to stay, and I was still burning up, so I just needed a cold shower. I took that shower, which mostly just helped to spread the pepper spray to the rest of my body.
After a couple more beers, it was time to sleep. Some of us slept on the floor of the house, but I was lucky enough to have a bed. The bed, of course, was a cot inside of a shed that sat in the dirt yard out back. However, for some reason it had an air conditioning unit and it was cranked up to ten. I gotta say– it was lovely. My body still burned through the night, so the sleep was hit or miss, but an air conditioned shed was all you could ask for in a Texas summer.
In the morning, we went inside where the whole family sat around in a rectangle of couches in the living room. They had a couple pitbulls who liked to defecate inside the house and whose owners liked to not clean it up, so there were piles of that in random places on the carpet.
Then, for no reason whatsoever, someone brought out their Glock and passed it around, as if it were an old photo album of the family’s most cherished memories. Pointing it across the room, at the ceiling, looking it over from every angle. At one point, someone cocked the slide back and got a look inside the chamber: “Oh shit, this thing’s loaded!”
It was time to get out of Texas.
Course 4
Dessert: River Water
I bought my first wedding ring on Amazon, because I knew I couldn’t be trusted with valuable things. As predicted, I did lose it, but the $17 I spent on the ring was worth the life lesson and the story that came with it.
Once a year, a handful of my college friends would get together for a weekend of what most college friends get together for– drinking, games, and risks. Sometimes we’d play cards or cornhole or disc golf, sometimes we’d drink four Four Lokos and forget what planet we were on. Usually someone was injured and hopefully it wasn’t worse than a dislocated knee.
This time, it was almost way worse.
We had a place in West Virginia, right outside Berkeley Springs. It was in the summertime, it was a perfect day, and we were looking for a place to swim and drink some beers. At one point, we made a stop in town to get coffee, and got the details on a nearby swimming hole. It was a nice place to swim, but pretty tame altogether. I struck up a conversation with a local kid and asked him if he knew of any good places to swim or cliff jump, since I’ve always found that cliff jumping spots are best discovered by way of mouth.
The kid told us to follow him in his car, so we set off out of town and soon found ourselves driving down an unnamed dirt road that must have gone on for two miles before reaching a river. We were in the middle of nowhere and there was no cell phone reception.
There were a handful of people swimming in the river and a couple people fishing below a dam in the middle. It was a peaceful river before it met the dam, which was about 12 feet high, piled with large rocks in the front. Near the end of the dam, on the other side of the river, was a large sign warning swimmers to stay away. Also on that side was a large cliff, probably a hundred feet high.
Swimming was great and all, but I came there to cliff jump. While I’d never jumped off anything as high as the cliff across from me, I was pretty used to swinging off big rope swings and jumping off 30-foot cliffs as a kid. And on that cliff in front of me was an outcropping about that high. I swam across the river and looked up at the outcrop and gauged that, even though the river was shallow at the shore, I could jump far enough out from it to reach the deeper part. So I started climbing towards it.
The cliff face itself was all loose shale and dirt and I was wearing a pair of sandals. It was steep, but climbable by way of hands and knees and grabbing roots of plants on the way up. However, it was the kind of cliff that once you’re up, you can’t go down because there were no available footholds– you’d simply slide faster and faster until slamming into the packed dirt at the bottom. This didn’t matter to me, after all, I was there to cliff jump, off and into the river.
I kept climbing, taking a sideways approach to the outcropping. Except– I climbed too high, and too far to the side. Because of the loose footing and the steep grade, I couldn’t get down to it. I also couldn’t go down the way I came, because it would basically be a long slide through sharp shale before crashing into the ground. The only way was up and it was far. It was a bad spot to be in.
For the next ten minutes, I tried not to look down as I crawled and clawed my way up this face, losing footfalls and grabbing onto things, one step at a time. Eventually, I made it to the top and a wave of relief rushed over me. From there I was able to walk down a large hill through the woods that came out about 50 yards from the bottom of the dam, where I was able to come across and back to my friends.
Then just when I thought I couldn’t do anything dumber, I go and do something like this:
Since I hadn’t really enjoyed the water yet, I got in for a swim. Some of my friends were swimming in front of the dam and everyone was having a good time, so I went over to enjoy the still and calming waters. Why not just swim right up to where the water was going over? After all, it was barely moving.
I swam over to the dam, and leaned against it– elbows on the top, face to the river, back to the wall holding millions of gallons of water behind it. Only an inch or so of water was flowing over the dam, and damn was I about to learn how much an inch of water can do to a person. Because, at that moment, I thought– I should just lift my feet up and relax on this wall.
I had barely lifted my legs when I felt an enormous surge grab both of them and push them up, as if gravity had reversed itself. As soon as I realized what was happening, I flipped over into a push-up position against the wall, trying to gain an upper hand against the weight of the entire river. When nature is winning, it usually wins, so of course my resistance was futile.
Within seconds it flipped me heels over head, down the dam, bouncing off boulders along the way. I was cut up and bruised, but miraculously didn’t hit my head on the way down. When I came out of the water, there was another rock outcropping in the middle of the river extending from the bottom of the dam. The water kind of guided me that way, so I went with it and grabbed onto a ledge, my arms and head out of the water, the rest of my body below. I went to pull myself out– and couldn’t.
The river was pulling my legs, trying to take me into an eddy that went under the ledge I was holding onto, a place I surely would have never come out of. As much as I tried to push myself up, I could not. Luckily, one of my friends was walking on the dam nearby and I was able to yell for him to come help me, which he did. He grabbed my hand and pulled me out. After almost dying three times in the last half hour, I was just absolutely done.
I realized shortly thereafter that I lost my wedding ring on my tumble down the falls. Better than losing my life, which is hopefully worth a little bit more. At the very least, it gained some interest. I also have a far greater respect for water, because it truly is a camouflaged force that deserves much more respect than is often given.
West Virginia, you truly are wild, but maybe not so wonderful.
End of Menu
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.