I have not drunk a bottle and a half of red wine in one sitting since the night I signed up for online dating on Match in July 2020, all alone with the dog, at the kitchen table, trying to figure out what to write. I’d spent the last ten years writing about other people and did not have the faintest clue about how to represent myself to a prospective date. By July 2020, I was feeling a little boring, which was one of the worst crimes I could have committed growing up as a kid. I’d met so many eccentric and fascinating characters in the Catskills over the years, how could I compete with them?
One of these fantastic characters was Ray Turner. I was given an assignment by my editor at The Watershed Post: a profile on this wily fisherman who trapped eel on the Delaware River every year in September with a gigantic, v-shaped weir that he built with his own hands from wood, and huge stones hauled out of the river, a sight to behold and an extraordinary accomplishment.
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