On Brine, Tides and Time

Thoughts on life on the river

Scott Meyer on Trout River at Congaree and Penn. Photo by Stefanie Keeler.

I wasn't born on the bayou. But I learned to waterski there, my older cousins pointing out alligators as I teetered past them on wobbly skis. My maternal grandparents were Hubba & Boop. Their house on Bayou Lacombe was a place where my family would come gather during the holidays and summer. I remember when too many blue crabs were stuffed into a boiling pot in the kitchen. They climbed on top of each other to escape their fate, dropping onto the floor while my family was distracted by a football game that rumbled on the television. Once discovered, I was tasked with catching the crabs one by one with a dip net, and back into the pot they went. The property at Lacombe was washed away by Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago, but the memories of alligators, those blue crabs and my cousins' Atari console remain steadfast.

While it would be many years until I formally studied riverine estuarine and marine ecosystems, it was the time spent with my paternal grandparents, Oma and Opa, in Apalachicola Bay that spurred my interest in the connectivity of our southern water systems. I caught big bull reds in the cut, cruised St. George Island in the Orange Monster (Opa’s tangerine jeep with a rusted out floor), frequented Harry A’s Oyster Bar and began to understand the relationship of ocean life and estuary systems. I have only made my way back to the Forgotten Coast three times in the past 25 years, but it is the place that shaped my love for the water and the fish and shellfish that call it home. Like Lacombe, it too has been tested by hurricanes, and strained with water flow limited by growing use upstream in Georgia. It is not the same as it was remembered. What in this ever changing world is?

While I was blessed with long stretches of youth at Lacombe and in Apalachicola, the bulk of my years have been spent in Northeast Florida, fishing and exploring along the St. Johns River and its northern tributaries. Lately, I’ve been frequenting the Trout River, fishing for sheepshead, redfish, flounder and, of course, trout. Those who join me often wonder why I taste the water before fishing. I do this to gauge the salinity, to understand the current conditions. I could keep a refractometer in my tackle box to see how many parts per thousand of salt the water contains, but this is much quicker and I pack light.

The past few months have been dry, leaving the Trout River often very clear. On a recent occasion, I was surprised by a shimmering in the deep channel way upstream. I tossed the cast net and was

rewarded with a bounty of 2-3-inch menhaden [pogies]. The next hour of catching speckled trout was a whole lot of fun, and wrapping up the day by frying fish in my cast iron skillet is what life is all about.

Whether memorable or mundane, fleeting joys on the river will always overlook the magnitude of the processes that diligently bent the landscape over millennia. The life of a river is a patient choreography of sediment redistribution driven by slow forces of geology and climate. The St. Johns River emerged as intracoastal lagoons were trapped by the formation of dunes paired with a falling sea level around 100,000 years ago. This lazy and ecologically diverse river spent over 90,000 years carving its path, only becoming the river we know today in the last 7,500 years. Now I wonder how long this river will continue flowing North until it eventually blends back into the sea.