I've heard of how many bikes they fish out of Amsterdam's canals, but magnet fishing goes beyond that. For the price of a strong magnet attached to a rope and dropped into a body of water, Europeans, and now Americans are enjoying pulling things out of the water that attach themselves to the magnet.
There is very rarely anything of monetary value that gets hauled out. The WSJ today does one of their inimitable A-Hed pieces by Ian Lovett on the pursuit of happiness that has evolved since the lockdowns caused by Covid-19 have taken populations away from their usual recreational ones and pushed them into new ones.
The social media platforms of TikTok and YouTube are the Super Spreaders as you might expect. No vaccinations needed there. Just access to the Internet.
Some localities around the globe are frowning on the practice, since the "fishermen" just leave their catch on the dry land they were standing on, usually creating a pile of wet, rusting, slimy junk that just needs to be hauled off by the garbageman.
To me, the most interesting items retrieved are guns. One can imagine a cold case getting solved now that the weapon has been found. So-and so will now get arrested now that the weapon is traced. Or, at least that's the fantasy.
Safes are another item that create intrigue. Have they already been opened? Emptied? Still full of passports and soggy cash because the perps were not good enough to get them open? How big are these safes? The article doesn't say, but even a small safe can hold some mighty valuable things.
When they finally found the fugitive Whitey Bulger they found $800,000 stuffed in the walls of his condo. Given that this was an outlier haul, and on dry land, it is probably unreasonable to expect to find a watery safe stuffed with anywhere near as much money, but one can dream. Magnet fishing is the stuff dreams are made of.
Bikes and shopping carts are the most prosaic of the items retrieved—and the least interesting, unless of course there's a bike that can be attributed to Lance Armstrong that has traces of banned steroids. But he's old news these days anyway.
Unexploded ordnance from WWII has been found, and even a toilet, although you wouldn't expect a toilet to have enough metal on it to attract a magnet. But there you have it.
And while a briefcase filled with old vegetables doesn't quite exactly remind me of my father's briefcase, it does make me think of the memories I have of what he kept in his—unopened mail.
As with a toilet, you wouldn't expect a briefcase to throw off enough of a magnetic detectable field, but I guess the clasps and perhaps the handle bracket were enough to create attachment to a magnet.
As for my father's briefcase, it was a solid, square-cornered one from the 60s and 70s, long before adult males started using backpacks and L.L. Bean bags. He traveled back and forth from Washington D.C. to NYC nearly every week of the year, and aside from the room he needed to carry the quart of scotch that he treated himself to as he rode the rails, he carried the mail—his mail, unopened and unimportant mail. He carried unopened junk mail.
He was a terrific procrastinator, and that extended to his mail. He also had trouble throwing anything out. He looked at his mail, but that which wasn't important enough was left unopened and carried back and forth with him until he was basically carrying several pounds of unopened junk mail.
It was never apparent to me how much junk mail he was giving round trips to Washington until he retired and was admitted to a hospital. It was then the briefcase lay in one place and was up to me to go through it at his request to "see what I've got in there."
Massive amounts of ads and junk mail, offers for all kinds of financial, credit card deals, and most notable, swatches of cloth from Haband, the folks who made men's pants that you could order through the mail.
This is decades before online shopping. HABAND FOR MEN offered samples of different fabrics and colors that you could make a wardrobe from. At least the pants. There may have been other items offered, but it was always the offer to stitch you a pair—or several pairs—of pants to your specifications that I remember most.
My father never ordered any pants through the mail, preferring instead to buy used suits from a tailor on 18th Street, just west of the flower shop, Witt and Panatella, a few doors down from Pete's Tavern. My father came of age during the Depression, so new was not something he was used to. Our house was furnished with used furniture throughout. The only new piece I can remember was a couch he and mother once bought that was a Castro convertible. No one was putting those out on the curb.
Magnet fishing I'm sure is not here to stay. There are those who go fish fishing who catch and release what they catch, not bothering to keep what they caught. No cleaning, cooking and eating it. Just hanging out, hauling a catch in, and unhooking it and releasing it back in the water.
The only difference with those kinds of fisherman and magnet fishermen is that Magnet fisherman don't throw their catch back in the water.
This has to at least make the environmentalists happy.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment