Free In God We Trust by Jean Shepherd Page A

Roller Rink and the Dance Hall are seventeen small shacks known as Beer Halls. And surrounding this tiny oasis of civilization, this bastion of bonhomie, is a gigantic sea of total darkness, absolute pitch-black Stygian darkness, around this tiny island of totally decadent, bucolic American merriment. The roller skates are hissing, the beer bottles are crashing, the chicks are squealing, Mickey’s reed men are quavering, and Life is full.
    And in the middle of the lake, several yards away, are over 17,000 fishermen, in wooden rowboats rented at a buck and a half an hour. It is 2 A.M . The temperature is 175, with humidity to match. And the smell of decayed toads, the dumps at the far end of the lake, and an occasional
soupçon
of Standard Oil, whose refinery is a couple of miles away, is enough to put hair
on
the back of a mud turtle. Seventeen thousand guysclumped together in the middle, fishing for the known sixty-four crappies in that lake.
    Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, created by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic-plague bacillus. They have never been known to fight, or even faintly struggle. I guess when you’re a crappie, you figure it’s no use anyway. One thing is as bad as another. They’re just down there in the soup. No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everybody’s fishing for them. At two o’clock in the morning.
    Each boat contains a minimum of nine guys and fourteen cases of beer. And once in a while, in the darkness, is heard the sound of a guy falling over backward into the slime:
    SSSSGLUNK !
    “Oh! Ah! Help, help!” A piteous cry in the darkness. Another voice:
    “Hey, for God’s sake, Charlie’s fallen in again! Grab the oar!”
    And then it slowly dies down. Charlie is hauled out of the goo and is lying on the bottom of the boat, urping up dead lizards and Atlas Prager. Peace reigns again.
    The water in these lakes is not the water you know about. It is composed of roughly ten per cent waste glop spewed out by Shell, Sinclair, Phillips, and the Grasselli Chemical Corporation; twelve per cent used detergent; thirty-five per cent thick gruel composed of decayed garter snakes, deceased toads, fermenting crappies, and a strange, unidentifiable liquid that holds it all together. No one is quite sure
what
that is, because everybody is afraid to admit what it really is. They don’t want to look at it too closely.
    So this mélange lays there under the sun, and about August it is slowly simmering like a rich mulligatawny stew. At two in the morning you can hear the water next to the boat in the darkness:
    “Gluuummp … Bluuuummmp.”
    Big bubbles of some unclassified gas come up from the bottomand burst. The natives, in their superstitious way, believe that it is highly inflammable. They take no chances.
    The saddest thing of all is that on these lakes there are usually about nineteen summer cottages to the square foot, each equipped with a large motorboat. The sound of a 40-horsepower Chris-Craft going through a sea of number-ten oil has to be heard to be believed.
    RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRR !
    The prow is sort of parting the stuff, slowly stirring it into a sluggish, viscous wake.
    Natives actually
swim
in this water. Of course, it is impossible to swim near the shore, because the shore is one great big sea of mud that goes all the way down to the core of the earth. There are stories of whole towns being swallowed up and stored in the middle of the earth. So the native rows out to the middle of the lake and hurls himself off the back seat of his rowboat.
    “GLURP !”
    It is impossible to sink in this water. The specific gravity and surface tension make the Great Salt Lake seem dangerous for swimming. You don’t sink. You just bounce a little and float there. You literally have to hit your head on the surface of these lakes to get under a few inches. Once you do, you come up streaming mosquito eggs