  When I was a little girl, for a summer, I got to go with my mother who was a shrimper out of Mississippi on several fishing trips.
One of those trips is a memory that means a lot to me, and I've tried to capture it in writing before and failed miserably. I hope to get it right eventually. It's not really a "happy" memory, but not a sad or tragic one either.
But I guess it's the closest I came as a kid to a vacation of sorts. I always think of this period when I am on a boat, especially headed out to sea when you can still see the port behind you and you're not yet far enough to see the bending curve of ocean on each horizon. We began by loading up with groceries. What I remember best were the crackers and Cheese Whiz. I'm sure there were other foods; if you're out at sea for an entire week, you need a fair amount of food to eat.
But all I really remember is the Cheese Whiz. I can still taste the salty not-cheese flavor of that too-orange spread on saltine crackers, and still see the captain of the boat, a grizzled, scruffy-bearded man who smelled like fish and the vinegary combination of sweat and stale beer, who looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, spreading the cheese methodically on his cracker.
When he wasn't eating crackers, he liked to examine the contents of his nose in a long, gooey line spread between thumb and forefinger . He also had a bum leg, and a metal pin in one leg that made him limp terribly. He was not a very nice man, and scarecrow thin. He was my mother's boyfriend, and the man responsible later for our moving to Louisiana. (A totally different story).
But I remember that he seemed to begrudge me the food I ate, as though having me on board made the burden of being out at sea that much more difficult, like I ate more than anyone else onboard and didn't contribute anything that made my keep earned. As we left the port, with waves breaking fast and hard against the front of the boat, salt spray whipping into my face and landing on lips, eyes, and hair, dolphins raced with us, starting with three or four, and up to the eight I counted eventually.
Their sleekly wet, glistening grey bodies arched through the air and they stayed ahead of us, and you could almost hear them laughing as their mouths turned up in that perpetual dolphin smile. We must have been going pretty fast, and you could hear the engine pounding, sounding like one of those older rides at the carnival, one you wouldn't really want to ride because it seemed unsafe but your friends would dare you to get on anyway, and you'd ride, holding tightly to the seat restraint for dear life.
Even with our speed, though, the dolphins would stay right in front of us for a delightfully long time. At night, the boat would jolt and sway us to sleep, and I remember the sound of the engine, which was a loud, diesel vibration deep beneath the area where the sleeping bunks were. The beds were made of that yellow foam, about six inches thick, foam which was dusty and slightly mildewed-- the sheetless bunk was a long rectangle tucked into a wooden platform that you reached with a ladder, and you also had for comfort a thin, sweaty-smelling pillow, and a light blanket that used to be white but was gray with use.
The entire inner cabin smelled of old fish and smokey fuel, and cheap, spilled beer. If you craned your neck, you could see into the front of the captain's room, where the instruments glowed blue and orange and the radio crackled unintelligibly about coming storms and people from other boats cursed and laughed. During the day, the boat would lower its big wooden doors, the mechanism that regulates the shrimp nets, and after they had been dragged behind us for a long time, they would be pulled up, heavy with a rounded dripping mass of fish and blue crabs and grey slimy shrimp and blackly-blue stingrays and eels.
The nets would open and dump the catch on the deck. The shrimpers would then "pick out" the good shrimp, the fish that they wanted to keep, and anything else would be thrown over the side. Crabs would scurry sideways towards the little holes in the side of the boat, escaping to the ocean.
Those that couldn't make it would balefully glare at you with their eyes on long stalks, threatening with one large claw, and they would pinch you if you reached stupidly for them. One kind of fish had what seemed like human looking teeth, and big, wide eyes with a black center, and it would gasp hopelessly lying on its side and send shivers down my back. I sat on top of the wooden stage-like opening to the boat's "cooler"-- a cold storage room in the ship's center filled with ice inside the ship where the catch would be placed later.
I reached down, grabbing long shrimp whiskers and placed "my" catch into a bucket. I was proud of my catch because I only grabbed the longest whiskers, and so my shrimp were all large and my bucket filled quickly. But I was very slow, compared to the adults, and considered a nuisance and usually had to wait inside the cabin because I got in the way.
There was even a storm that spawned water spouts, and I remember lying in my bunk as I heard the rest of the crew yell over the wind. During the storm, lightning hit the boat, shorting out the radio and streaming along the lines above us. The next night, after the "pick out" was over, several sharks began to follow the boat, greedily scooping up the castaway bits of the last catch. The captain tried to scare them off, but they kept coming back. They finally got into the nets the captain had cautiously lowered, thinking them gone, tearing the rope nets so badly that the captain had to decide to quit the trip. I remember the captain taking his pistol and shooting one of the sharks in the head, and the other sharks turning on their now dead partner.
But the damage had been done, and we had to turn back because the repairs could not be done while under way. In his frustration, the captain did not notice a sandbar and ran up on it, breaking the propeller shaft. Because the radio was still out, we couldn't call for help and were stranded over night, and late into the next day until, with their bathing suits on, my mother and sister (who was with us on this trip) waved another boat down.
We were then towed into Louisiana, where the boat got its repairs and we eventually headed back home. It was probably the worst trip, and plagued with bad luck after bad luck. After all the bad luck, headed back into the harbor as the sun began to turn the clouds over the horizon gold and pink and purple, and the water that indigo-grey color like well-washed denim, I remember sitting in front of the boat again, same salty water in my hair, and eyes, and on my lips.
And dolphins racing before us as we neared the shoreline. 
