The great response to my last post “Black Water Encounter” inspires me to re-post some of my earlier writing on waters I have known.

Rainy Night Dreams

27.02.2020 / JOSEPH KITCHENS / DEEP SOUTH STORIES, WRITER’S JOURNAL

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.