Roots in Sand
by Sean Murphy

I’m not what you would call old, but sometimes I feel it.

Today is one of those days, when memories come readily to the mind’s surface as the cold, rainy wind blows, tracing the outlines of broken bones, each one a memory.  Some carry funny stories; some, not so much.  I feel them all as I walk along a new beach, doing what I do every winter, look for new places to fish. 

This will be my second summer living on Cape Cod, which makes it the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere.  I take note of darker water and current seams – the interesting places – a fisherman’s eye instinctively seeks out features like these and focuses on them.  I could walk for ten miles and find only a handful of these areas, so each one is precious - far too precious to miss.  I don’t bother taking pictures or even committing them to memory; this is the ocean and before the end of a single tide the sands could shift themselves into an entirely different pattern.

Not like granite, not like home.

I catch myself mid-thought.  For whatever reason, I have always considered New Hampshire’s White Mountains to be my home.  I didn’t really grow up there or live there for very long.  In fact, I spent only a bit more than a year living on my grandmother’s farm when I was eight.  I do not call it home because of Sunday meals or warming pies – there were neither – more, because of secret fishing spots and brook trout; because it was where I learned a natural world is one I fit best into; because when I returned to my parent’s house in the city, I felt very out of place in my own room.

A small thing, really, but a small thing that changes means far more than a large thing that stays the same – a stone on a sandy flat, far too precious to miss.  It is just a thought, though, and not truly an honest one.  The White Mountains are not my home, no more than Boston, New York, Presque Isle, Maine, or several other addresses to which I’ve had mail sent.  The truth is I’m not really from anywhere, and there is nowhere to return to.

For years it has been an empty goal of mine to return home.  Something I always told myself without really listening.  I miss mountains and rivers.  The truly majestic power of a maple in its autumn raiment is not easily replaced by scrub pine, a feeble-looking tree with its roots in sand, cowering by the sea.  The sea is very beautiful, but not welcoming.  Like true art, it seems more a reflection of the world than a part, a chaotic swirling of thought and dream; one can look upon it for a long while without noticing time, but this is winter.  Soon the beach will be full of people, and the energy of the sea will be muffled by battery-powered radios and the rattling bass of blown out speakers.  I will not come here then, for it will no longer be a wild place, the kind I understand.

These thoughts are a bit much for me, so I concentrate again on fishing.  White foam surges through a funnel in a sandbar, spilling into a dark trough.  I imagine a deceiver dancing through that cut in the sand, to the stripers, which surely must lie in wait.  I smile.  Finding spots such as this is the biggest challenge for a fisherman with no “home water” – I’ve gotten rather good at it, though not good enough.  I think of other spots I’ve found over the years, most of which I will never return to.  I wonder if there is something wrong with moving from place to place and having no bigger regret than having lost a fishing spot.  I do not miss the people I’ve worked with or communities I’ve been a member of, only the current seams and hidden eddies I’ve uncovered, the insects and crustaceans I’ve learned to masquerade hooks as.  Changeable as the natural world can be, it is constant in its principles.  It may be the only thing.

I look at the scrub pine again.  The sickly vision, its twisted trunk and oddly angled branches filled with random clumps of needle-like leaves, seems awfully beautiful to me now.  It grows; it lives.  These roots do not find the promise of rich soil shored up by thick blocks of granite; rather, it finds purchase in a dune of sand clinging to life by sheer force of will, each day boldly facing the changing sea.  I wonder if it is not the sight of the maple that I miss, but the scrub’s roots that I lack.

Through all my address changes I have had just one companion, fishing.  No matter where I find myself I can always find fish and comfort, and be happy.  A hobby?  Perhaps.  A colossal waste of time, to catch a fish and then turn it loose?  Maybe.  Yet, for good or ill, it has become the largest share of what I am.  When I day-dream it is about fishing, when I exercise my broken elbow it is so I can cast again, and when I take my wife for a romantic stroll along the beach, invariably I am looking for a place stripers can trap bait.  All of these things are a part of what fishing means to me, yet more so; it is the sense that when I am on a stream, lake, pond or the ocean I am where I am supposed to be.  I feel no desire to be anywhere else, no need to do anything except that which I am doing, to be nothing more than that which I am.

It feels like home.