by Paul H. Thompson

Created on: July 15, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It's late September and a midday sun. Scant shade under a flawless sky. Two seasons of drought alter the edges of my favorite farm pond. Its receding shoreline leaves exposed clay flats greening with ground-hugging weeds where fat-bodied largemouth and enormous bluebill used to hunt beneath overhanging brush. I'm sitting submerged to the waist on a mesh seat inside the doughnut hole of a nylon-encased truck inner tube. My legs dangle in the warm water, now and then I kick my legs, waving my scuba fins as I slowly, easily cruise this pond I've been fishing for years. It's a fine, consistent fishery, but today the catching is tough. The paucity of rain has skewed once sure-fire patterns.

My weighted streamer plunks down onto the brown surface and vanishes. I bounce it along the bottom. Imagination tricks me into setting the hook into a twig hauled up from the mud. Cleaning off the snag, I fin the float-tube back, cast again, lengthening the line to cover greater distance. Structure to target is scarce in this pond, and the low water has left much of itthe handful of submerged cedars, the remnant of a boat dock, the tree roots at edge of a small islandparched in the sun. Even the mud flats that normally harbor juvenile bass seem barren. But the fish are out there. They're always there. Today, they feed sporadically. An occasional marauding bass exploding in showers of minnows along the far bank attests to their presence.

Time passes slowly in the glaring light. Floating, seeking the mellowing tonic that a day on the water normally brings, I'm fidgety, picking up line too quickly, casting too often, laying out loops of fly line that slap the surface with fish-scaring splashes. There are days when being peacefully suspended here in the pond, easing along the banks is enough. This is not one of those days. I want a fish, a small rush of triumph against Nature's wily ways. I know this water well and the frustrationmuch as I try to tamp it downis mounting.

I haven't fished much this summer, so my expectations, I suppose, are high. The year itself has been a tough one for me. Mired in numbing depression and unemployed as I've been for months, I'm struggling with life on many levels. Fishing is an outlet, a balm against the blues. I need a fish. I don't get desperate often, but today the water must yield something more than a cooling presence in the heat of the day. I watch closely for signs, something to tell me that, fish in hand, things will turn out right.

Then it arrives.

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