Projo — Shoreline access: A fishing story (Op Ed)

May 14, 2022

By Jake Lunsford — I love fishing stories. I see them as allegories for hope. Casting your lot into the unknown, you hope the tide will take you to some future, some place, from which, up from the depths, a fish will rise. But how to tell a fishing story if you never catch any fish? It begins with having a place to fish in the first place.

We are perched, my sons and I, on the banks of the Palmer River, whose brackish waters run between Warren and Barrington, but we are not after perch. We hunt tautog, a fish with teeth straight from an orthodontist’s chair. There are none at the moment. Any moment. Ever.

My grandfather told stories of running telephone wire into the backwater eddies of the Broad River, down in Georgia, sending a powerful current into the muddy waters. Electricity-stunned catfish would come, turning bellies up, to the surface. I inherited that same electric power.

I cast my line into the current, and like my grandfather, an electricity flows through me, up rod and down line, into the dark waters. This is the moment when my power is greatest.

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