he's officially a hogan now

got skunked

Yesterday morning, Faith and Nalini and I rose early for some salmon fishing in Grand Haven. We got skunked, immediately, and literally. We arrived on the end of the pier and cast a line or two in the early morning light. I was still trying to net some bait when Faith said, "There's something down there in the water. It's alive. I think it's a skunk." I looked over the edge into the dark and saw some jetsam that looked amazingly like a two-striped skunk, sloshing around near the end of the pier. I assured my animal-loving wife that it was just a bag or who knows what and commenced with netting some bait. Two minutes or so passed. "No, it's alive and it's a skunk." I looked again. Somehow the bag had turned into a living skunk, which was in fact paddling around for dear life near the end of the pier. Now the end of the pier is several hundred yards from shore, and by all appearances this poor skunk has been sloshing around down there for the better part of a night. Faith, immediately compelled by the moral urgency of the situation, exclaims "We need to rescue it." I appealed to logic. "No, just leave it there. It will swim back to shore. You can't rescue a skunk." But she had already set down her pole, and judging by the look on her face, compassion and notions of restoring shalom had taken full control of her psyche. She grabbed the small bucket with a rope on it, meant for drawing water into the bait bucket, and proceeded to try bucketing the skunk. The skunk seemed to recognize that the bucket was a means to salvation and actually complied with the operation. However, the critter was so exhausted that it couldn't quite coordinate the rolling waves with a tipsy bucket. My sanguine hunter instincts kicked in again, and I went back to fishing for real fish. For a couple minutes. Then Faith said, "Now what should I do?" I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "With the skunk... where should I put it?" I looked over the edge and saw a bucketed, water-logged skunk critter. His two front paws grasped the edge of the bucket, barely able to hold his head and shoulders above water. An older fisherman, who was not at all in favor of the operation from the beginning, said, "Don't bring it up here. I don't want no skunk on the pier." I semi-honored his request. I hauled it carefully down the pier about 20 feet, expecting that at any moment it would jump out and spray me. I looked him in the eye to calculate his motives. He glanced back as if to say "It's all good." I then realized that the skunk was far too thankful to spray, or maybe too humiliated--not to mention that his butt was still under water in the bucket. I then readied myself for the worst, tipped the bucket and got the heck out of the way as he and the water washed out onto the pier. He was barely able to stand and just basked on solid footing for a while collecting his wits. Finally he took a tentative step toward real land, tried to shake the water off, walked about 15 feet down the pier and settled in for a rest. For the rest of the morning, we listened to the walker's comments about a skunk on the pier this morning. If only they knew.
(Pictures forthcoming)