The disease was called “lockjaw” by all who dreaded it, and we were all taught to dread it in our turn. Neither I nor anyone we knew ever claimed to have had it, tetanus, that is. That fact might have led some to think we were being overly cautious but, for my grandmother, it just meant we’d done a good enough job of being careful. So far.
It turns out the disease, which really does cause muscle spasms that can include the jaw, is caused by getting a pretty common bacteria into your bloodstream through a puncture or cut. Beyond the jaw portion, the other symptoms run downhill quickly from there. Grandmother was right to have us avoid it.
The infecting injury doesn’t have to be from rusty metal, or any kind of metal at all, though. Anything sharp enough to make a puncture or cut will do, though rusty metal certainly qualifies. Any time we were handling rusty metal, though, we were to be on the lookout for a potential case of lockjaw along the way.
I thought about this as I chose a piece of random scrap steel out of the bucket at my feet, then tied a fathom of waxed nylon twine to it.
I passed this weight forward to the Old Man. He attached it to the trotline we had just set out by putting the weight’s line through a complementary loop in the trotline, then putting the weight through the loop in its own line and letting gravity do the rest.
A trotline is made up of a long, straight, main line with several short drop lines tied to it at intervals. Hooks go onto the drop lines, bait goes onto the hooks and, hopefully, fish come along and take the bait.
Each hook does not get a weight, but the main line should be pulled as tight as mechanically possible between the anchor points at either end, then it should have a few good sized weights added here and there along the main line. That combination does the best job of keeping the line from tangling on itself, and keeps it in front of fish.
These weights can be anything heavy and, otherwise, useless. Picture, if you will, a five-gallon bucket of assorted lockjaw. The Old Man had long since retired from JESCO and had gone to work for himself with his own welding shop. His specialty came to be building ornamental iron fencing that was very popular in new construction at the time. He also regularly took on heavier projects, and his shop produced scrap steel in the same way a carpenter’s shop produces sawdust and scrap wood. The heavier of these scraps were enlisted as trotline weights. At my feet sat a bucket of such in random configurations, some with an edge sharp enough to shave a flea, each heavy enough to break your foot if fumbled.
The Old Man took another weight and gave me a thoughtful look.
“The one certain thing about life is, you only get to live it through one time,” he said. “It’s important to learn from your mistakes, but you shouldn’t over do it. Beating yourself up about how things might’ve been done differently is just about the most destructive and wasteful exercise I know. And I should know, because I’ve done a whole lot of it.”
I didn’t see where he was going, but just listened. Sure enough, he reached his destination.
“The thing to decide is this: What difference does what you’re worrying about make in your life going forward from here?” he said. “Make sure the weight of what you’re carrying around is worth the trouble of lifting. Otherwise, scrap it.”
I thought that was a pretty apt analogy, even then. Besides being heavy, the weights are just waiting to give you a good dose of lockjaw along the way.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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