Doughtie: In life's darkest hours, nature can be a great healer

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It's a time to be with family, feast, laugh and, after the big gorge, for me at least, have a peaceful snooze.

But on the flip side, the Thanksgiving through Christmas season also makes me sad in a way. If you have never met me or spent time with me you probably think I am some macho outdoorsman, but I hate to burst that bubble.

I am in reality a softy. A perfect example of this is whenever I hear the song "The Little Drummer Boy" during the Christmas season. Something in that song makes me tear up. It evokes thoughts of people who have nothing or of people who are going through rough times and, quite frankly, I wish I could somehow reach inside these folks and take away their pain.

During my lifetime I have had more than my share of tragedies that could have easily taken me down. When I as 14, my parents had gone to the Savannah airport to pick up my oldest sister, Alice, as she was coming home from college for a visit. Without going into too much detail, they were involved in a horrible car accident and instantly my cozy little world was flipped upside down.

For the most part, my parents were hospitalized for nearly two years while my sister Alice remained in a coma for four years before passing away.

Family friends took turns caring for my sister Grace and I during that period, and had it not been for my love of nature, I seriously doubt I would have made it through this period without considerable mental issues.

The same goes for the time when I lost many of my best friends in an Eastern Airlines plane crash, which I was supposed to be on, in my senior year of high school, and then again when the best friend I ever had died in my arms of a heart attack as we fished offshore.

In each one of these traumatic events, it was nature that saved me, bringing me back from the brink of everlasting despair.

I know this sounds like a very dark column, but hang in there so I can hopefully shine some light on just why I am bringing these very personal subjects to bear. For the past few years, a dear friend of mine, Dan Cornell, whom I fish with regularly, would bring two of his friends down from Atlanta and we would take them to the Gulf Stream.

Both are in their 30s and as you might suspect, spending many days together in the wide-open ocean, I got to know them both pretty darn well. When you spend time with someone out in nature's finest playground, it's not like being together at a cocktail party or some other social event. Instead, you get to share unique experiences that tend to bond you for life.

One of these young men, Tommy, is a gentle soul. The father of five, four girls and one boy that range from 4 to 14, I always admired him for having the gumption to tackle such a lifelong commitment.

But when I received a call a week or so ago telling me that his wife had passed in the worst imaginable way, that "Little Drummer Boy" reaction came back to me front and center.

Yes, I cried and I am not embarrassed to say I cried a lot.

What would I do if something like that happened to me? Could nature save me in that type of situation? That's asking a lot.

As fate would have it, Dan, who has a second home in Wexford Plantation, suggested that Tommy and his five kids come to Hilton Head, use his house and get away from the avalanche of phone calls that he was no doubt getting.

When I heard he was coming, I called him and, feeling tongue-tied, I suggested I take him and his brood fishing. Nature had always been my savior so I thought maybe, just maybe, it might help Tommy. He was all in, so we met up on Monday.

I love kids. I love their energy and most of all their unabashed directness. Would I able to take them all away from the pain and sadness for just a few hours?

It wasn't long before we caught a small grouper. Then a flounder, another flounder and, unbelievably, each of the kids caught a flounder.

They were into it, and as I baited lines and handled young squealing anglers, Tommy took that chance to lie in the sun, eyes closed with a slight hint of contentment. Heading home, I felt like a million bucks.

Even though it might have only been for a few hours in Tommy's forever changed life, nature once again proved to be the great healer.

This story was originally published November 30, 2015 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Doughtie: In life's darkest hours, nature can be a great healer."