Phantom Creek is a stream running below a partly uncleared hill of young redwoods in Vineland County. Its waters sustain a small family crawfish business, but the creek is also part of Zoyd Wheeler’s personal geography: he has known the people who fish there since the early 1970s, and his visits to them unfold against the long aftermath of his marriage to Frenesi Gates.

Setting and Access

Zoyd approaches by climbing the hill’s winding turns and descending toward the road that follows Phantom Creek. The morning fog has partly lifted, leaving a blue haze in which the distant trees disappear. The landscape is neither untouched wilderness nor fully cleared ground: young redwoods rise on a hill that has not yet been logged, while a working farm and a horse barn mark the human presence beside the water.

A mailbox line and a cattle bridge lead to the farm, where Zoyd parks by the horse barn before going inside. The creek is not confined to one fishing spot: the family gathers crawfish both upstream and downstream, as well as in a couple of nearby streams. That broader circuit makes Phantom Creek the anchor of a modest local livelihood rather than an isolated scenic landmark.

Fishing and the Riverside Household

Zoyd shares in the crawfish business with RC and Moonpie, a couple whose real names have been lost along with their traces after the war. Their children join the work. Morning, the eldest, wades in the stream, while the others carry jars and small bags of nails, fastening a piece of bacon to the bottom of each pool about knee-deep. When the family retraces its steps, crawfish have gathered around the bait; the children knock them with sticks and catch them in cone-shaped nets. Sometimes they let their parents help, turning the harvest into a shared family routine.

The catch travels from these pools to restaurants along U.S. Route 101, where it appears on menus under fashionable names such as California Cajun. The business links the creek’s improvised, hands-on labor to diners with expensive tastes, making the waterway part of an economy that reaches beyond the farm even as the fishing itself remains intimate and familial.

Zoyd’s Visits and the Past

Zoyd’s connection to the household reaches back to the beginning of the 1970s. He first met Moonpie at the Lost Nugget on the night his divorce became final, the evening before his first window dive. He briefly imagined Moonpie as an answer to the loss of his life with Frenesi, but that prospect vanished when RC returned from the restroom and Moonpie leaned her cheek against his hand, signaling that Zoyd should leave her alone. Zoyd had already changed his mind; he spent the years afterward still preoccupied with his former wife.

By the time of his later visit, RC is away working a day job in Blue Lake, Moonpie is tending to Lotus, the youngest child, and the crawfish are kept in an old Victorian bathtub repurposed as a trough. Zoyd and Moonpie fish them out and weigh them on a scale intended for seed, feed, and fertilizer. He writes her a postdated check, already late enough that covering the overdraft will be difficult. The practical business continues, but the scene also brings an unwelcome visitor from outside the household into view: Moonpie says someone at the Lost Nugget recently asked after Zoyd, a man RC thought he recognized. For Zoyd, Phantom Creek is thus both a place of work and family routine and a point where the unresolved past can find him again.