Cast Me Out Over a Mud Flat on the Coosa

Cast Me Out Over a Mud Flat on the Coosa

By Cola

I wonder if Hunter S Thompson’s ghost cares that I dig his style of gonzo, and his methods of psychedelic participant observation. What are any of us if not participants in some sub-culture like turkey fanatic Tom Kelly was in the chase of South Alabama turkey.  For me it has always been fly fishing. There is something exhilarating about poling a flat and searching for fish, but the sharing of this experience is both important and necessary. This is especially true in this world afflicted by hotter temperatures owed to climate change, and the accelerating rate of pollutants leeching into water systems from chicken plants, rendering plants, and other heavy metal producing factories diffusing pcbs and mercury into our wild rivers and impoundments from industrial processes that I can scarcely fathom. What I do know is a love for the resilient invasive species known to many as poopfish.  

This week my little sub-culture of carp fishing experienced an uptick in my devotion and attempts to figure the game out, bettering my methods with time on the water and heavily scrutinizing the minutiae of staring into mud plumes. The nagging question persisting of whether  that fish really is in there, or has it moved on to some new unseen location, unbeknownst to me. The water is way down in the drought of this Fall, and the fish are skittish about skittering flies being dragged and dropped onto their dinner plate. They also refuse to belly crawl as they are oft to do in the Spring and Summer months. They fear somewhat instinctively that they will become trapped with no way to swim off from the exposed mud flat. So they hang in deeper water in Fall, perhaps eighteen to twenty four inches of water feels better to their senses.

I took a woman to my favorite flat early this week. I have never fished with a woman that wasn’t somehow in my family. She and I marveled at free jumping carp when the waters were too turbid to see much definition in the rooters.  She was good company too, bringing me a Jack’s biscuit like she understood my sub- culture already. She was already initiated by a family of anglers, and she could cast. Man could she cast.

The next day I took a very cool friend on a buddy fishing trip. Meaning I did not charge him a fee. He is a great dude and sometimes gets a bad rap for posting images of every fish he catches like they are all somehow unique and not an abstraction or aggregation of multitudes of sunfish. He is a solid caster, but not as good as the lady I fished with the day before, but the conditions were better in that there had been another evening session of silt settling to the bottom of the Coosa. We could see their plumes at least.  

Even though these two anglers caught nothing, I took great satisfaction from the sun on my face and the wind at my back. It was a solid workout investigating the expansiveness of this particular flat. Something in my body ached after a few days of searching with no eats. Well, that is not entirely true. My buddy missed a hook set where the fly line visibly retracted the opposite direction from his strip, then went slack. 

I took solace knowing that I did the best I could, like any soldier existing in a sub- culture that requires great competence to be successful. Like ol’e Hunter with his post mori cannon, please shoot my ashes over this mud laden flat when I am gone. It is where I am most at home.