Reflections on Fishing

In memory of my grandfather, J.C. Benton, who died seven years ago today. I wrote this for a creative writing class in grad school while my grandfather was sick but didn't finish it in time to read it to him before he died. That night, I finished it and read it as his funeral.

I knew when he swapped hats my grandfather was ready to fish. He'd slip off his cap worn high on his forehead, advertising some long extinct outboard motor company or emblazoned with the Colquitt County Packer emblem, and replace it with his wide-brimmed straw fishing hat. Yes, it was only a hat, but it was tradition, symbolic of countless hours spent honing a craft that he only perfected. Others in our family are adroit fishermen, but my grandfather was the master craftsman, expert with a rod and reel or a cane pole, equipped with the nimble moves of a NASCAR driver on the trolling motor.

My grandfather's skills were God-given, but he'd spent a lifetime on the river. He fished the waters of the St. Johns as a boy, first brought to the river by his father, my Great-granddaddy Benton. They fished out of Palatka, 45 miles north of where my grandfather would eventually bring me, for mullet and bream. Those early fishing trips taught him the love of the open water while giving him the innate ability to fish the tightest overhangs. Without those early trips, my grandfather might never have discovered the river. Without the river, two generations of my family would have lived lives of lesser fulfillment.

He wore the cap on the truck ride down to the river, high, barely covering the wavy mop of white hair that served as his crown. Packing, unpacking, and packing again, the cap was a fixture. He worked the boat wearing the cap, storing bait and ice chests, passing out life vests. He and his cap would settle into the captains chair and, with a backwards glance and a smile, he'd gracefully maneuver the boat from its slip, tongue pushed to the side of his mouth, an unconscious reaction to everyday concentration.

Even on the ride out, his cap remained with the least bit of effort. I, on the other hand, lost two hats on that river, ripped from atop my head by the combined forces of a speeding boat and the open-water breeze, reducing me to ride with one hand high, holding my hat in place like some Spaghetti-Western damsel-in-distress, bonnet bobbing in a runaway carriage scene. Even in the stiffest winds, my grandfathers cap never moved, anchored as steadily and stubbornly as my grandfather himself, the hat a natural extension of the man.

Cutting the engine, the boat would sputter to a stop. Here, my grandfather's moves were deliberate and ritualistic, passing out poles and splitting bait, holding a bare modicum of balance against the rocking of the boat. Equally deliberate, my grandfather would change hats, moving from world to world, work cap to fishing hat, trading in every day life for the river. I searched for symbolism in the act, some sort of metaphor about casting off daily life for the peace my grandfather found in fishing. The real answer, I found, was less poetical.

"When the water is shallow, you can see fish in the shadows that you cant see with a cap on," he muttered matter-of-factly, a tone denoting his grandson should already know the answer to such simple questions. "Sometimes, you can't see for the light."

We'd float for hours on the river, shifting directions intermittently to the tune of his trolling motor, telling stories and jokes, laughing. I learned life's lessons from my grandfather, his blue eyes blazing from under the brim of his hat. He'd tell me about his parents and grandparents, about basketball trips and childhood pranks, even family secrets my parents had so carefully misplaced. We discussed the damage alcohol had inflicted on our family, the topic punctuated with stories of family members offered to the belly-god of malted barley. We talked of his own conversion and redemption, a peaceful realization with repercussions stretching into the next life. We discussed theology and politics, the latter of which focused more on common ground than differences. Through it all, my grandfather was truthful beneath his old hat. Good, bad, and sometimes terrible, he never hid facts from me, laying it all out without mincing words or prettying-up the unpretty. He opened my eyes on those trips.

Our days fishing gave me an understanding of how short life is, just how tentative our grasp is on this world, so little keeping us from slipping into the next. You could tell he didn't feel anywhere near the number of years he had lived, some 70-plus years removed from his birth, a half a century of life lived after Bigmama's house and the beginning of his marriage.

His stories allowed my mind to wander through my own plans for the future, pondering how quickly our own designs change because of the experiences life has in store for us. Would I end up back in my hometown with a nice little house, grandkids, and a modest retirement? Or was something else planned for me, some great unknown, a hand-written destiny that would someday guide me away from all this?

As if reading my mind, my grandfather said, "You know, my dad used to bring me out here to fish, and I brought my children and my grandchildren. One day, you'll bring your children, and maybe one day you'll bring your own grandson for fishing trips out here on the river."

I smiled, first to myself, then at him, knowing he was right, his intense blue eyes driving the simple statement home. One day my life will float along the same currents and around the same bends as my grandfather's. One day I will be the old man in the hat, leading my progeny to the fishing holes of my youth. One day will find me in the twilight of my own life, my own fishing trip almost over. Like my grandfather when that day comes I hope I am an "imitation" of the man, to quote the Dan Fogelberg song, a living legacy to a life well-lived.

As the sun set behind Shell Point, my grandfather would begin to wind up his line, casting the last drowned worm into the water, allowing it its place in the cycle worm to fish, fish to man, man to worm. I wasn't ready yet, not knowing if this would be my last time on the river with my grandfather, and I awkwardly swung my line out among the river grass, hoping for one last fish in the basket, a last moment on the river with the master. My grandfather smiled, perhaps remembering his grandsons pleadings as a child, "Come on, Granddaddy, just one more cast."

The fishing done, his grandson satiated, my grandfather changed hats again, replacing the wide-brimmed straw hat with his cap, ready to again face reality. He packed the poles away with equal ritual, and I followed suit, knowing that there is only one way one should pack away the boat: my grandfathers way, lest you are scolded and shown the correct way...again.

He returned to his captain's chair with a look back at me. We smile, and he asks me if I want to drive us back in, knowing I always do. We swap seats, my grandfather seated behind me, hand on my shoulder, finger directing me around crab traps and pointing to landmarks he'd shown me since my youth. The boat bounced over the breakers, across the leftover wake of a larger bass boat, headed for home carrying two fishermen, a boy and his grandfather, both at different points in their own fishing trips, but both fishers of the same river.

Wave on Wave

The battle of wave on sand is quite possibly the earliest sound uttered from this creaking old planet millions of years before human ears ever caught onto the song. Imagine that first moment, that first second, when prehistoric man discovered the rhythmic beating of water on land, first felt the salt air in his face, tasted a warm coastal day in his mouth. Imagine the moment - one unspoiled by thousands of dried-marrow, emotionally-flaccid essays on the subject - when man first felt attachment to the sea, first heard the drone of the ocean calling him to stay.

I have a friend, an anthropologist, who says that many early civilizations were afraid of the sea. Though several found bounty in its waters and learned to survive in the environment we now call prime resort location, others feared the ocean, feared the wide, endless horizon. These people moved inland, preferring the fresh water rivers for sustenance, secure in its set boundaries and permanent flow.

Still, there were those who braved the waves and the flash thunderstorms that afternoons bring to the beachfront, warm rains that seem to cool off the red-hot July days only to bring the humidity to intolerable levels later in the evening, creating an aura in which one needs gills to breathe. As Jimmy Buffett said, "Salty air ain't thin / It can stick right to your skin / And make you feel fine."

I would do just about anything to wheel my truck around that last curve and see the salty inland bay of Destin, FL through my windshield, to roll down my window and revel in the sudden thrust of salt air and fish, inhale deeply, and know I'm right where I need to be.

I want to be there.

I want to go back down and lie beside the sea there.

With a tin cup for chalice,

Fill it up with good red wine,

And I'll be chewing on a honeysuckle vine.

Leaving

The sound of a tattered canvas duffle bag hitting the rust-covered truck bed echoed far past the backyard planted pines and into the fields surrounding the neighborhood lake - a pond, really, dug from the exhausted soil of a former cotton field turned suburban neighborhood - and returned, diminished now but still familiar. It was a sound he'd heard many times before. He'd thrown his bag into the back of truck a couple of times a day for several years. Still, the finality of the moment, realizing that this would be the last time he stood in this spot of the driveway - his spot - hit him.

This was it. He was leaving. No more mornings smelling the blooming purple and pearl azaleas and dogwoods of a south Georgia spring, flowers that symbolized all he would miss of his home.

He was leaving his family. His dad, strong and vulnerable all in one moment, had asked him again the night before not to go, not to abandon all that hed known. His mother, a stalwart of emotional security, hadn't cried, but had looked at him with such helplessness that he knew her heart was breaking. She would survive. She'd always survived before, through her sons tumultuous teenage years when he'd been more instrument of torture than loving progeny, through the death of her father, the family patriarch, from an illness that drained not only his own life away but stole life force from an entire family leaving the a hollow shell of extended familiar ties in its wake. His sister, petite and as emotionally vulnerable, had cried on his shoulder before sliding down the hallway wall to her bedroom for the sleep that takes all problems.

Of course, he'd miss them terribly.

But he'd decided - no, committed - to leave, and he wasn't turning back now. He took a moment to look around one last time, to gather together the courage it would take to walk out of one life and into a new one, an unknown one, before flopping down into the driver's seat.

The engine hesitated before roaring to life, and he backed the heavy frame of the truck down the winding driveway to the only road he'd ever lived on. He breathed heavily and wiped a tear from his cheek before adjusting the rearview mirror to garner one last glance at his home. He jammed the stick shift down into second and faced the open road, somehow new to him even after all of these years, and turned the steering wheel south, guiding the truck to new destinations, new adventures, and the life he dreamed he would one day come to see.

Decoration day

Based on the Drive-by Truckers song "Decoration Day"

It's usually the insignificant moments which send me whirling back, lightheaded, giving birth to the fear and anger that most marked my adolescence. It's the smell of honey suckle on the summer breeze, or a glimpse of my father's cold blue eyes and hawk-like nose in my morning mirror.

Those moments take my breath, steal it from me, and leave me momentarily shocked and disoriented until I realize it's over, all the fighting. It's over, removed from the now-quiet existence I lead by three decades of life in this small south Georgia town.

Sometimes, I awake from sleep staring dead in the face of the broken, crying teenage boy we left in the woods that June night, the sound of my brother's voice exhorting me to run faster reverberating around the three bedroom ranch house of my new life. Those moments leave me searching for security, forcing me to touch my wife for some shred of reality, her mere presence pulling me back from the netherworlds of my dream-like state.

It's the quiet nights on the porch where he haunts me, that boy, and my father's voice, too, winging out of the planted pines, carried on the wind, reminding me of my name, my life, and the heritage of pain of he left me.

At one time I took pride in the heritage. We were soldiers, warriors in the grand family tradition. We were Lawsons, true to the name and to the family. We were defenders of the land, keepers of the fight, perpetuating three generations of familial hate with the Hills.

I saved the newspaper accounts of the events, each tucked quietly away inside my mom's Bible, placed high on the shelf in spare bedroom where no one is likely to find them. Each clipping, now somewhat yellowed with age, recounts the struggle of two families locked in a generational grudge match, a battle to regain lost prides by the genocide of the opposing family.

Each article somehow works in "feud," though the word doesn't quite capture the struggle. It was more than a feud. For us it was a war more real than any battle fought in Vietnam or some armpit Central American country. This was our war, our fight, and it was in our backyard. It was the classic struggle against the "principalities of this present darkness," as my father so often called it. To my father it was a spiritual battle, though it was wrestled day to day by men of flesh and blood in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

I don't remember the beginning of the violence any more than I remember the first days of my own life. It was always there, a permanent fixture of my childhood home. My mom said my first word was "fight," my second "Hill." I somehow doubt that, though it wouldn't surprise me.

As a child, I didn't really care why we fought or hated, just as long as we did. It was nice to have something to hate, something to serve as the antithesis of our good and perfect family. The hate was comfortable, a way of life.

I remember my father telling jokes about the Hills, mocking their rusted-out car, mouth replicating the exaggerated engine noise and grinding gears as he rocked back and forth on the porch. The boys would laugh and egg him on, my father always obliging with more vigorous rocking and an even louder grinding of the gears, often accompanied with his mangled mimicry of the Hill's speech pattern.

Mama would smile and tell him to behave himself before returning to the inside of the house. Dad would continue, quieter this time. Even Daddy didn't want to aggravate Mama.

Truth be told, their car was no less rusty or noisy than ours, and their speech patterns certainly weren't much different, each retaining the somewhat cumbersome dialect of the foothills, not quite mountainous but not quite flatlanders either.

Now it's Decoration Day, and as my pastor speaks from the pulpit of honoring the fallen veterans of the community, I wonder how to honor my father. The pastor urges us to take a flag to mark the graves of soldiers in the church's graveyard. My son moves beside me, eager to sprint down the aisle to grab a flag.

My father was a soldier.

In my father's case, a flag seems inappropriate, a touch too patriotic and respectable for the old man. Truth be told, I've a mind to roll a stone on his grave, I chuckle dryly to myself. Perhaps that would keep the old man in his resting place and remove him from the guilt I carry, the blood on my hands only I can see.

I laugh aloud to myself, wondering what he would say if he knew my thoughts. "Son, keeping me down won't keep you away."

I suck in air too quickly, cough, and shiver, suddenly cold from memory of my father's voice. I know I'll never escape it.

Comfort in the Senses

The human mind is a wondrous creation if for no other reason than the curveball of reminiscence it throws at us on occasion. You can be walking down a hallway, smell the subtle saltiness of Play-Doh being rolled out by eager young hands, and feel the shift of remembrance in your stomach, suddenly rushed to your pre-school classroom and a moment of smushing different-colored dough together just to see what happens. Or catch a whiff of feet and sweat and you might be back in your high school locker room, reliving past glories and failures, celebrating the friendships and waxing nostalgic (bitterly, sometimes) over what might have been.

This happened to me twice this past week. Monday, I had the opportunity to go fishing with my grandfather, father, and uncle. As we walked along the banks of the river, I noticed the air was scented with an amalgamation of smells: honeysuckle, wet grass, and fish. Though understated, they brought with them the comfort of a hundred hours walking the banks of rivers and the rabbit trails of local woods. It doesn't matter what's been happening in my life, the stress melts away on warm spring days that smell like fish.

The second instance happened just today. I walked in after a long day of work, tired, ready for my summer break, and was suddenly surprised by the smell of peaches. Instantly, my mind wafted back to my childhood days filled with peach cobbler cooking in the oven, peeling peaches on my grandparent's front porch in Coolidge, and the day I found out what happens to your nose if you smell a peach to closely and rub the fuzz into your cheek. The smells rejuvenated me and I walked into the kitchen to find Jessica cutting fresh peaches at our table.

It was picturesque - perfect, this moment - and I know the image of my beautiful wife smiling, slicing peaches in the hot afternoon air will be with me until the day I die, tucked back in some shadowy recess of my mind, ready to spring forward and surprise me with yet another charming memory, more proof I've lived a pretty dang nice life.

There's a certain perfection that permeates those odd, aromatic moments.