I actually have been fishing since the last post, just not much.
See, the house is for sale, layoffs are looming and my wife and I are expecting another baby.
When those ominous planets line up, well, it's tough to justify bugging out at the roll call of dawn and selfishly suiciding myself from the rest of what matters most.
Fact is, the last time I did, I nearly killed my best friend down here. I told him to head up the bank, but he ended up waist-deep in mud. It wasn't until the good Lord intervened that he corrected that misstep in both my directions and, well, Ian's direction.
But we fished with shaky knees and caught nothing all morning.
That's karma.
I wonder if I'll fish again in the Lowcountry. At least anytime soon.
Most of the gear is stowed for when the house sells. Oh, sure, my primary flyrod, reel and vest are handy, as are my mud boots, but sticking close to home seems like the rule now.
It's not that I don't want to fish; it's that I don't want to leave the tumult, or at least be away from it for even three or four hours.
Even though that's exactly what I need to center myself.
The answer that Nature provides is one that we shouldn't close our ears to. It's in her roaring brooks, screaming oceans and whispering trees that the answers reside.
And they are loud and clear.
It's in the texture of the fish's scales, in the sharpness of the billions of tiny shardlike reflections of the sun on the surf, and it's the horizon that quits some 30 or 40 nautical miles out to sea.
It's the smell of the plough mud, the salt, the fish slime, the wooden dock, the musty lining of the bamboo rod.