Yesterday I mentioned my encounter with a skate (or maybe it was a stingray) in Pamlico Sound. Following is an account of a stingray sting that happened to island fisherman Uriah Garrish (1905-1988) sometime in the early twentieth century. Uriah had been stung three times. Alton Ballance tells this story in his 1989 book, Ocracokers:
"The first time I got stung was the worst," Uriah recalled, "We were fishing down on the eastern end of the Legged Lumps [a shallow area in Pamlico Sound], and when the stingray stuck me he rammed it right through my heelstring and it came out the other side. He didn't leave it in me. Anyway, your Uncle William brought me home in the old Kingfisher. There was a doctor here for a while, and he took one of these small swabs and put Mercurochrome on it and pulled it through the hole on a string. Somebody gave me a fifth of liquor to kill the pain. He [the doctor] told me not to drink it, and he took the bottle and wouldn't let nobody in the room with me. Sometime later that evening after I woke up, he was there drunker than a bat. He had drinked all my liquor. I was laid up a month before I could walk."
Our most recent Ocracoke Newsletter is a compilation of humorous stories told by or about islanders. You can read it here: http://www.villagecraftsmen.com/news092113.htm.
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The doctor said, "This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me."
ReplyDeleteI'll never forget Steve Irwin, may he RIP. A life which he "lived by the sword and died by the sword" DD
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