Breakfast Chat

She fixed potatoes and I had some. And then sometime later, waffles. Filling and delicious, not as good as talk accompanying the meal.

It was my wife's idea. Old Wooden Bridge Fish Camp on Big Pine Key, 2007. Again in 2012. And now she told me Irma's Eye stormed right through, and she had fears the cottages are gone. I watched the radar representation on TV and it looked like maybe the eye cut through just a little to the north, but maybe I'm mistaken. She had heard it announced Big Pine Key took the heaviest wind.

"Why don't you come out to the reef with us?" I asked. Thinking ahead to next time, in spite of the storm.

"You two are daredevils," she said. My son and I.

I took her out on a rental at Ocracoke, 2005, and she screamed with terror when I clocked the engine towards full throttle.

Conversation touched on a number of things; one of them the hurricane my original family sat out at Southern Shores, North Carolina's Outer Banks, 1976. I was 15 and taken by the storm. I felt a great desire to go out and fish the surf in 75-mph wind. I had fished earlier in the day or the evening before, surf high and pounding, waves at least 10 feet, and what I'm pretty sure was a bluefish slammed the Hopkins I cast, though failed to get hooked. I was hooked. And I later got in an angry fight with my father about going out in that storm. When I calmed down, I realized the situation I had put him in. How could my father let his son go out in a clearly life-threatening storm? I remained sure I would have handled it OK, and I still feel this same way, but of course I understand what the real issue of relationship was.

Fast forward to 1999. This anecdote is a little absurd, but maybe fun. I finally went out in a hurricane. Floyd. It had calmed enough to allow safe driving. Maybe it was the eye. I don't remember. Maybe the end of it. There's a pond in Bernardsville. I've caught bass in muddy water on spinnerbaits. So I cast a spinnerbait...into the eddy of a river. The entire acre or two was one big fast current, besides an eddy.

I was just "messin' around" as J.B. Kasper once remarked about my Opening Day trout fishing effort in 1994. I took offense to Joe's words, but on further reflection later, no, because I prefer not to make the outdoors a duty, if I can avoid that sort of damper on the fun and enlivening spirit.