Reeling In Time with Fish Tales. Brian E. Smith

boys ready?” asked Mr. Poe.

      We both said, “Yes, sir,” but were sound asleep within a mile. I opened my eyes a couple of times en route, just long enough to notice the sky changing colors, but dozed off quickly to the sound of country and western music from the radio.

      The truck came to a stop about an hour later on the right side of a dirt parking lot at Muddy Creek Marina on the edge of Back Bay, Virginia. Billy and I woke up in the sho’ ’nuff country. The kind of country where you feel like you traveled back in time. Weathered skiffs, with antique black or white motors, hung off the sterns, atop rusting trailers along the shore. Under tin-roofed pole barns, crab traps and eel pots, thinly coated in dried algae, were loosely stacked for storage. They were amongst a clutter of outboard motor parts, containers of lubricants, trailer tires and rims, trailer parts, a scattering of tools, an anvil on the end of a very well built wooden workbench, and a double handful of extra-long cane poles, their brightly colored floats making them stand out amongst all the other stuff. Additionally, there were some children’s toys they had dropped off here and there when the mood hit them to go do something else. Dirt covered most everything in and around the pole barns. A pattern emerged; the higher something was off the ground the thicker it was coated with dusty spider webbing. If the coat hangers, used to suspend the cane poles from the rafters, would ever give way, the poles would remain in place.