BOB KORNEGAY: A good time to be in a good place

Somehow this all seems fitting. I’m sitting on a pond bank, my shoes are muddy, and the catfish are biting. The overturned five-gallon bucket leaves the imprint of a red-rimmed circle on my behind through the denim of my jeans. The gore of freshly dissected cut bait and sun-ripened chicken livers is drying to a thick crust on my palms and beneath my fingernails. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to look up and see vultures circling above me.

Yet, here I am, disgustingly happy and getting hungrier by the minute. Strange how the anticipated aroma of breaded catfish fillets in hot grease so easily overcomes the odors and uncleanliness associated with their capture.

Yep, it just seems right. I am a boy again. The outdoors writer whose life is inundated with bass tournaments, the fly fishing arts, and bluewater behemoths. The sporting scribe steeped in the mythical tradition of aromatic pipe smoke, tweed jackets, and mountain trout has at last returned to his roots. I barely resist the urge to kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the mud. Ah, glorious temptation.

My buddy flashes a knowing smile. He reads me well, understanding my feeling this way on a quiet Sunday morning beside the still waters of a small South Georgia pond.

“Some things you just don’t outgrow,” he says. “When it’s all said and done, I’ll take catfishing over any other kind.”

I’m not sure I agree with that, but his point is well taken. I’m not in the least ashamed or concerned that some urbane sophisticate might spy me here doing what downhome folks do and loving every minute of it, everything about it.

My friend, a fellow writer, is the perfect partner this particular day. An accomplished angler in both fresh and salt water, he readily expresses his real love for plain old “meat fishin’,” an activity many of us “sophisticates” have come to view as being a bit beneath us. It’s nice to be brought back to earth once in a while. A cathartic sort of “grounding.”

I have run nonstop most of this weekend, jumping from place to place, interview to interview, in search of story material. Fishing and compiling fast and hard, I take time out only to curse malfunctioning cameras and dying recorder batteries. Now, my buddy saves me from myself just by sitting me down on the bank of a catfish pond, fishing’s equivalent to a skilled ER physician in the world’s finest trauma center.

Best of all, today I find more stories in two hours than I unearthed during the past two days of harried searching. I don’t know which of us feels the urge to share more often, but the tales we tell come naturally, in great number. They roll off the tongue like they all must be told now, lest the moment end and stifle them forever.

This is the perfect place for storytelling, I think. It is a place like the places where these stories were born. I hear of his grandfather and fishing trips past. He hears of my own Daddy Buck and like excursions. We laugh together, grow nostalgic at certain points and even argue and debate a time or two. All becomes fodder for the creative mill. I shall go home with my mind straight and clear for a change.

There is but one notion that clouds today’s unusually clear thoughts. Today is Sunday, after all, and some will wag fingers and pass judgment that we should be starched and ironed and sitting in church. They could be right. I don’t pretend to know about such things. I do know my grandmother would have heartily agreed with them.

But I also know this. This place, at this moment, is a good place for Bob to be. It breathes new life into me. I won’t be so disrespectful as to say Born Again, but it ain’t a bad analogy.

Bottom line is, I really don’t think any spiritual force that governs the goings on of lesser beings would mind my being here at all.

Not one little bit.