A Season for Endings

Chapter One

Whenever I took a mind to pull on my boots and set out into the grand, vast saltmarshes of coastal Georgia—the marshes beside which I grew up, the marshes that I have smelled and seen and marveled at virtually every day of my life—I always felt as if I were going back in time; as if I were journeying into a primeval world that was all heat and mud and water and sunlight, in which I was the only human being. For me, these marshlands were, and remain, less a feature of the modern landscape than a remnant of the planet's infancy; the geographic equivalent of the ancient horseshoe crabs that scour the sea-floor today just as they did some four hundred million years ago, their habits unchanged since a time when the Earth was so new that plant life had not yet appeared on land, and a day was only about twenty-one hours, rather than the current twenty-four, as our newborn world spun faster in the cosmos than it does now.

My cast net bound me to that newborn world. It binds me still.

I must have been about seven or eight years old when my father taught me to throw a cast net. Getting the hang of it takes a while—or at least it took me a while, since I'm a slow learner—but once you've had enough practice the net becomes like a part of your own body, so that when you hurl it out you feel as if it's an extension of yourself reaching into the warm, silky-green waters of the tidal creek, as opposed to some ungainly web of monofilament ringed with tiny weights.

In the grand year of nineteen hundred and ninety-one I was still practicing; the movements didn't feel natural yet. Some of my throws, I think, were pretty good for a nine-year-old: with great force, great confidence, I flung the net away from me and watch it open wide over the water, saw it crash and sink in a perfect circle. Most, however, were just okay, and my performance didn't seem to be improving as the hours wore on. Worse, I hadn't caught much today—certainly no fish I felt inclined to go to the trouble of filleting—and my mouth had acquired a bitter taste from putting the lead line in it so many times, making me thirstier when I was thirsty enough already. At about ten-thirty, I decided to call it quits; I had been out at the creek since seven-fifteen.

I dumped out my bucket, hoisted the cast net over my shoulder, and started a slow trudge over the marsh back home.

It was summer, a lively time in the marshlands of coastal Georgia, when hot mist rises from pools of saltwater left by the receding tide and the thick, shimmering air buzzes with the commerce of dragonflies. I didn't have far to travel to get back to my house: about eight hundred yards. I knew well the areas where the ground was relatively solid and dry, just as I knew which areas tended to be boggy. On this bright morning in May, however, I made the mistake of overestimating my agility.

I was in a hurry to get home; in a hurry to shed my boots, take a drink from the garden hose, and then rinse off all this mud. The faster I traveled, the sooner these things would happen. So when I came to a narrow gully that I was accustomed to hopping over each time I went out into the marsh, I made the mistake of not following my own procedure. Normally I would put the cast net in the bucket, and then gently toss the bucket to the other side, so I could make the jump unencumbered. It was never difficult.

Today, though, I decided to jump with the bucket in my hand and the net over my shoulder—a feat I had never attempted before and, afterwards, never attempted again. Even as I began my leap, I knew I had miscalculated. The cast net added more weight to my frail form than I had imagined, so that when I pushed off the bank there was not enough power to get me all the way to the other side; the bucket swung out, further unbalancing me, and the result was that I hit the opposite bank, slid down, and rolled over onto my stomach in the bottom of the gully with the bucket landing on my back and the cast net landing I knew not where. I learned a valuable in physics that morning; I also gained a snoot-full of mud.