From the 1972 movie “Deliverance”:
1st Griner brother (Seamon Glass): “What the *#@! you wanna go *&^% around in that river for?”
Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds): “Because it’s there.”
1st Griner brother: “It’s there all right. You get in there and can’t get out, you gonna wish it wasn’t.”
High-school teachers and college professors value students who can apply literature to other situations, places and times.
“Deliverance” has been on my mind as I’ve thought about recent skirmishes between North Carolina’s recreational saltwater anglers and the for-profit commercial netting industry.
Besides being a crackling action tale, James Dickey’s novel has multiple layers. For the English profs, let’s admit one right away — yes, it’s like Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” But it also has the theme of man violating nature and nature’s hostility to man, plus minor chords of alpha males, anti-technology, duality, hubris, man violating man, Southern hospitality, large cucumbers and, finally, the darkness of it all. “Deliverance” students probably could name dozens of other sub-texts.
A theme common to the book and North Carolina’s saltwater battle is one group struggling with another group for the right to enjoy and use a natural resource, as in, “Should the state allow otter trawling of inside waters to net (on average) one pound of shrimp while killing five pounds of juvenile fish and destroying bottom habitat because it’s been done in the past?”
Yes, we’re talking money, and people will fight to keep making it, even if it means abusing a natural resource. Not a surprise. But the battle shouldn’t be allowed to descend to physical intimidation — which has happened.
Stories of shout-downs directed at recreational anglers at N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission public hearings are well known. Once, a commissioner who was also a commercial fisherman even verbally abused a female DMF biologist at such a hearing.But I’m going to talk about something that’s mostly kept hidden: physical intimidation tactics used by some (emphasis on “some”) netters against outspoken recreational anglers.
One saltwater guide told me he won’t park at certain boat ramps because a Coastal Conservation Association sticker is on his truck window.
“Don’t want to risk getting my window smashed,” he said, relating that two netters who thought they were visiting his wife’s workplace told a co-worker she should tell her husband to keep his mouth shut at public hearings.
“I also always believed (the late) Sen. Jean Preston didn’t support (recreational anglers), but a mutual friend said she did,” he said. “She was just afraid to vote for any bills that would help, because some of these nut jobs down here had threatened to burn her house down.”
When it comes time to vote, legislators should remember that threat.
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