On winter’s rainy nights I sometimes lay awake and try to remember the waters I have known and loved. I fished the creeks of Burke and Richmond Counties with cane poles as a boy. Swam there too because we could not visit the public pools, even on the hottest days, for fear of catching polio. When I was old enough to paddle a boat, my father carried me along for company to the ancient mill ponds on the Brushy and Brier Creek waterways. Once we camped in our Henry J automobile right beside the St. Mary’s River. There were summer trips to the beach -Tybee Island was my family’s place to escape for generations.
We later moved to the coast. Crabbed and fished in Brunswick Sound. While carrying a crab basket and walking along the scaffolding built for workmen on the new bridege to Jekyll Island, I fell off and nearly drowned before grabbing on to one of the pilings; then my father swam out to rescue me. I was ten. Salt water in your nostrils and hair, the taste of crab stew and the soggy aroma of the marshes at low tide-these memories are never forgotten.
I bought a flyrod and tried to learn the art as a young man. I once caught a Brown Trout no bigger than two fingers wide in a stream near Carrolton. Occasionally, I still cast into the Amicalola and take a small stocked rainbow. One jerk and its over. Nothing like the arm-numbing challenge of reeling in redfish and flounder. But the water! The sound of it rushing past in endless currents. In another life I fished offshore for King Mackeral and saw great rays slide beneath our boat at the Shark’s Pool off Mexico Beach; watched the pelican formations glidding by.
Once my work carried me to a place in the great longleaf pines of South Georgia where I cast into the shallows of a duck pond when the bream were on their beds. I was the only person there for what must have been miles. What a luxury solitude is when enjoyed in natural places. In the heat of summer, near dusk, once in a great while, a deer would crash into the water to escape the biting flies, then swim across to the opposite bank and vanish into the woods-unaware that I was watching this miracle unfold. I shared the pond with snakes and alligators as well. We took care to avoid one another.
Life on a lake is pleasant too, especially because of the changing scenes: an alligator glides toward a heron, a bass explodes on the surface to capture its prey. Once a panther walked across my backyard as I drank my morning coffee. He turned and left as he had come, back into the swamp below the dam, along the stream. There the bass congregated in the spring to spawn, having climbed upstream as far as they could. I watched an old woman one day fishing there. She suddenly got up off her overturned bucket, and beat a four foot mocassin into a writhing heap. She returned to her fishing, unperturbed.
Someone half-quoted to me once: water can absorb all a person’s worries. The bigger the water, the easier it swallows what aches.
I also remember the building of the bridge to Jekyll, My family used to stop and pickup the milk that was produced by the prisoners on the farm on Jekyll when we would come in from shrimping.
Harrel,
Thanks for reading. I am planning a longer piece about falling off the Jekyll Bridge when it was under construction in thearly 1950’s. We you on a commercial boat or shrimping for your table. Either way would enjoy hearing about it.
Joe
I loved this journey and share you love of water and miss my lake house.😥😪
I loved this journey and share you love of water and miss my lake house.😥😪
Loved it!
I wish you had expounded on falling off the bridge.
You taught me how to fly fish! Loved it.
Now that is my kind of writing there! Loved it and love you.
Joe, I too love that aromas from the marshes;nothing compares. Every time i go back to Sav’h I roll down the windows to get that special smell,even driving into Sav’h off I16.
I look forward to your articles. They are so engaging. As was today’s lecture.
Such a poetic posting. It was as if I were with you on your adventures. I grew up inland and always longed for water views. I used to squint my eyes looking out over the cornfields that surrounded my 2nd floor bedroom and see a sea rippling around me!
Thanks, Connie. Just back from Saute Nacoochee-headwaters of the Chattahoochee. Tomorrow I will be in Thomasville among the Long Leaf pines. I appreciate your encouragement.
Soothing
Are you doing radio in Savannah?
Really nice, Joe. So beautifully descriptive.