First Light on Lake of the Pines

In late August in East Texas you fish at first light or you do not fish.

By nine the heat is on the water like a lid. By noon the bass have gone deep and so should you. The window is the hour on either side of sunrise, and I have built a good part of my recovery inside that window.

The lake

I live on Lake of the Pines now. Around eighteen thousand acres of water on Big Cypress Bayou, ringed with pine and cypress, quiet in a way that a man who spent years in concrete cells does not take for granted.

I do not own a bass boat. I have a kayak, a rod, and a box of soft plastics I have been fishing the same way for twenty years. That is all the equipment this requires and I want to say that plainly because the internet will tell you fishing costs eleven thousand dollars.

What the hour does

I have talked openly on this site about PTSD, about the years in custody, about the hypervigilance that does not switch off just because you walked out a door. I have written about still counting the exits in every room I enter.

Here is the thing about first light on the water. There are no exits to count.

It is the one place my nervous system agrees to stand down. Not because I told it to. Because the water is flat, the light is coming up gray then gold, and the only thing that can surprise me is a fish. Somewhere in the first twenty minutes my shoulders drop about two inches and I did not decide to drop them.

I do not fully understand it and I have stopped needing to.

The honest part

I want to be careful, because there is a version of this that sounds like a cure and it is not.

Fishing did not fix anything. I still go to the VA. I still do the work in the rooms with the professionals. I still have days when the lake does not do a thing for me and I paddle back in worse than I paddled out.

What it does is give me one reliable hour where the baseline drops. Where I can feel what calm is supposed to feel like, so that when I am back in the truck, in the office, in a courthouse hallway, I have a reference point. I know what I am trying to get back to. Before the lake, I had forgotten.

If you are a veteran reading this and somebody told you to go fishing, they were not wrong. They were just incomplete. Go fishing and keep the appointment.

What I actually do out there

Launch in the dark. Paddle to the same cove. Cast a Texas rigged worm along the same line of cypress knees I have been throwing at since I moved here. Miss most of them. Land a few.

I do not bring the phone out of the dry bag. That is a rule and it is the hardest one to keep.

When the sun clears the trees and the light goes from gold to white, I am done. That is the signal. Paddle in, load the truck, go to work.

The whole thing is ninety minutes and it holds up the other fourteen hours.

The season is turning

We are a few weeks from the first cool mornings. In September the topwater bite comes back on the lake and I will fish later into the morning and the whole thing gets easier.

But I want to say something about August specifically, because August is the hard one. It is the month where you have to get up in the dark to get the hour at all, where the discipline is doing most of the work and the reward is thin.

I go anyway. Not because August fishing is good. Because a man who only shows up when it is easy has not built anything.

If you are near the lake

The public ramps are free and the water is open. Get there before the sun. Bring a whistle and a life vest, because I have pulled people out of water that looked as calm as this one.

And if you see a bald guy in a kayak throwing at cypress knees, that is me, and I will not wave until the light goes white.