How's the Fishing?

 

Still a little weary from yesterday’s rot. My brain is still unloading the damaged files of my life. I just got back from the barber shop getting my son and myself a much-needed haircut. So I’m sitting here with a little smell-good on my neck listening to someone down the road with a back-up horn beeping away. After a healthy, normal conversation at the barber shop about grandbabies, old sugar cane mills, and pea shellers, it was nice to have a pointless conversation face-to-face with strangers.

It reminds me of the long summer days swatting gnats and talking bullshit around the cabins back at Uncle Shed’s Fishcamp. Even back in the 70’s and the 80’s it was a trip back in time to a place where city folk could rent a cabin, a john boat, a paddle, and even tackle to fish on the Ogeechee River. By the time I got there, there were still a few people renting cabins or using the boat ramp to put out. So the conversations were varied and lively, talked with old friends of the campground to new families just looking to get away.

While it’s now considered in the city limits of Savannah, Georgia, back then it was a thousand miles away from the busy port city. A place where I could collect my thoughts and try to mature into the man I am today. But now the cabins are all but gone and only a select few can open the large iron gate to get in. The spoils of the camp have been divided equally between the owners' children, who now bicker and fight as adversaries rather than siblings.

It bothers me to see them with no clear direction, watching the decades-old cabins rot to the ground while they argue over the remains. It isn't the wood and nails rotting that hurts the most; it's the fact that the ground itself is no longer used or even desired for what it was meant to be. It’s just a prize to be won now, not a place to be lived in. Sadly, I have no dog in the fight. But I am still considered a brother and a friend to the siblings.

So I sit on the sidelines waiting to hear their verdict, missing the place more and more. While the remaining memories of the place are firmly etched in my mind, it’s the small gifts like today’s barber shop conversations that take me back. Back to a time when conversations mattered and unrest could be tamed with the question, “How’s the fishing?”

#detox #sanctuary #memories #emotions #time