by Roger Pinckney | Dec 30, 2024
Lowcountry of South Carolina. Two-thirds of my county is underwater at high tide. If it bites, it lives here. Deer flies, horse flies, dog flies, chiggers, sand-gnats, three flavors of ticks, assassin beetles, 56 separate species of mosquitoes, any number of...
by Roger Pinckney | Dec 13, 2024
An unlikely life. He was an English banker who ran off to America at an early age. He nearly starved in Mexico, bunked in a California bordello. He passed himself as a cowboy, farmer, lumberjack, Yukondog-musher and gold miner. He drove an ambulance in the First War...
by Roger Pinckney | Nov 22, 2024
Ain’t nothing to writing Papa Hemingway said, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed. I sat at the keyboard and cried for Zebo, damn near about shorted it out with my salty tears. It’s a twisted tale, as good tales are. Me and Miss Biscuits built a house on...
by Roger Pinckney | Oct 25, 2024
The dogs struck in the old ricefield bottom, grown up now in a great snarl of water-trees, the bell-trunked tupelo, sweet gum and soft maple, the ground beneath a foot deep with the soggy litter from the last hurricane surge, driftwood snags and ricks of dead spartina...
by Roger Pinckney | Oct 10, 2024
Forget about deer stands,” he said. “Just boost your woman high up in a live oak late in the afternoon. That way you’ll know she’ll still be there when you come to fetch her home after sunset.” We were on his front porch, out of the wind on a chilly afternoon, easing...
by Roger Pinckney | Sep 3, 2024
Daddy sent Theodore off to Harvard in 1876 with this advice: “Take care of your morals first, your health second, and your studies third.” Predictably, young Roosevelt was a better boxer than student, much preferring independent inquiries rather than activities...
by Roger Pinckney | Aug 29, 2024
It was a Federal Criminal Conspiracy: three boys, a cannon barrel and scaup to drive them crazy. The saltwater scaup are mostly gone now, but back when I was a boy they would raft offshore, a thousand, ten thousand at a time. It would take a booming gale to get them...
by Roger Pinckney | Aug 15, 2024
She was a great Nordic beauty, and she came with a duck lease. She was a green-eyed freckle-faced redhead, long of hair and limb, married a couple of times before I met her but neither lasted too long. Her name, literally translated, meant “the daughter of an angel of...
by Roger Pinckney | Jul 17, 2024
Papa called her Pilar and she was a fishing machine, a 1934 Wheeler Playmate, custom built to his specifications in a Brooklyn boatyard. She was 38 feet at the waterline, with a low-cut transom rigged with a roller for sliding fish aboard. She held a ton of ice, had...
by Roger Pinckney | Jun 14, 2024
Me and Poach and the Window Wizard, walking this scrubby sheep pasture west of town. Sheep got buck teeth and clip the grass right down to the dirt. Canada thistle and prickly ash take over, tight clumps around the boulders the glaciers brought when they came and...
