Weather making it difficult to make new memories

For an outdoors writer like myself, February is one tough month to come up with content — especially if it has to do with fishing.

Even though temperatures have been warmer than usual, even that can change in the blink of an eye. This past week is a perfect example. It was 85 degrees Tuesday and 52 Wednesday. With temperature fluctuations like that, how in the heck am I supposed to figure out what type of fish to target?

I thought about heading south to the Ogeechee River to try for American shad, but I didn’t. Twenty minutes later, I considered sheepshead fishing, but the tides were flipped and I didn’t. I could go down the line of possibilities considered but, to be brutally honest, I got so confused I sat and watched movies all afternoon.

If ever there was a year when Mother Nature has done her best to play tricks on an outdoorsman like myself, this is that year.

Driving around, we see azaleas in bloom and my cherry tree’s buds have burst. Yet as much as I usually rely on these indicators to fish for this or that, it’s so crazy and mixed up out there it has me all crazy and mixed up, too.

Even taking anti-depressants hasn’t helped. Ideally, I am waiting on the first day when the winds are calm enough to make it to the Gulf Stream to chase wahoo, but as the saying goes: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

My wish for calm seas has gone unnoticed.

Even on the warmest days, the wind has kept me landlocked smothered in yellow clouds of pollen. Is it too much to ask for just one day out there in blue water that would surely cure all that ails me? Apparently it is.

So what should I talk about until the Old Lady decides to play nice?

For whatever reason, I have been daydreaming a lot about my life growing up here. Luckily living where I do, it is about as close to what it used to be like as you can find anywhere nowadays. But when I decide to head to the grocery store and run smack dab into all the traffic and people, I go into a trance of sorts.

Back in the day, half the roads I now travel didn’t exist and the rest were either quiet two-lane highways or dirt roads.

I did attend public school in Bluffton throughout grade school, until the school burned down and we used the Methodist Church on Calhoun Street until a new school could be built. I never got to attend the new school because my folks had the brilliant idea to send my siblings and I to a private school in Savannah!

Now remember, I lived on Hilton Head at the time, so talk about a long day. It makes all your complaining about traffic snarls a cakewalk compared to what we had to go through.

Up at 5 a.m., home at 5 p.m. All the roads were two lanes and all it took was a farm tractor driving down the middle of the road to add another hour to an already long day. The bridge going over the Savannah River was a toll bridge and, because the school I attended was on the south side of Savannah and Abercorn Street was two lanes, it made for one heck of a ride.

Along with the Fraser and Hack families, our folks went in together and bought an old Checker limousine — Sea Pines green, of course — and our driver was a distinguished looking black gentleman named Willy.

Willy had a sculpted face, wore a chauffeur’s hat and how he dealt with us is a still a mystery to me. What I would give to find a picture of him.

Farming was also big back then, with lots of tomato farms and pig parlors. Down Pinckney Colony Road between Bluffton and Beaufort, the Helmley family had a sizable pig operation and, because Thomas Helmley was my age, I would often spend the night there. I got to know a lot about pigs.

Tom’s mom was a sweetheart and his dad, despite a disability, was one hard-working, gentle man. He would buy truckloads of expired bread from the Claussen Bread Company, a local bread company, and I can still remember riding in the back of their pickup truck throwing out loaves of bread (still in the bags) and watching the pigs have at it.

That’s when I learned that pigs will eat just about anything, and I mean anything. Besides that, they had breeder sows that were the size of a Volkswagen and I even learned how to castrate male pigs — something every 8-year-old boy should learn to do.

So until I am able to get offshore, this is what you can expect. Memories are pretty cool, all right, but right now I want to make some new ones. Come on, Mother Nature, give me a break!

This story was originally published March 4, 2017 at 8:09 PM with the headline "Weather making it difficult to make new memories."