After looking at the pelicans, my parents and I walked further out on the pier. I photographed the waves and thought about the cover of 'Nowhere,' the album by Ride that has long been one of my favorites from the shoe-gazing era.
I was distracted by a disturbance a little further out on the pier. A man's fishing rod was sharply curved over, straining with the weight of a sting ray hooked on the end of the line.
The ray had clearly exhausted itself and was lolling back and forth. (It was definitely not LOLing, however.) I felt sorry for it, and wondered what it would feel like to bite down on a piece of food, only to discover that you had been ensnared by a merciless hook and then tugged (as you fought for your life) into a strange environment where you couldn't even breathe. (This could be a metaphor for the modern workplace, obviously.) I remembered with some regret the many fish I had similarly tortured in my youth, and -- although I can't pretend to be a vegetarian -- felt that I no longer had the stomach for this kind of activity.
The ray was brought up to the pier with a net, where a group of men conferred about how best to handle it. Eventually one stepped on its tail while another used a pair of pliers to pull the hook out of the ray's mouth. He next motioned to cut off the ray's tail, but the other man stopped him, bemoaning the needless cruelty of such an act (he didn't use those exact words, however). Having freed the ray from the line, the less sadistic man kicked it a few times until it flopped over the edge of the pier and dropped fifteen or so feet to the water, where it quickly seemed to recover and swim away.
I remembered how when I was maybe four or five years old, I heard a story about a kid who had hooked a manta ray off a pier in Fort Lauderdale, and rather than let go of the rod, he had been pulled into the sea.
Presumably this kid is still being dragged along the bottom of the ocean somewhere, although I saw no trace as I looked north along the coastline.
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