We rolled up to the beach in a battered Jeep Cherokee, the sandy pavement crackling beneath our tires. My friend Lee Hopkins threw the shifter into park. He was an ace shortstop and near-scratch golfer with summer-blond hair and freckles. Hints of pink showed underneath his clear eyes, like ballplayer’s eye paint. His true love was marshes and streams.

      Before us lay Gould’s Inlet, the narrow entrance to the river and salt marsh that divided the island we lived on—Saint Simons Island in southeast Georgia—from the southern point of Sea Island, an exclusive resort where I worked at the bicycle shop, renting beach cruisers to well-heeled vacationers. We were sixteen years old.

      The inlet glittered like a long sword under the summer sun, slicing through the soft flesh of beaches and sandbars. A beautiful streak of water, but deadly. The tide roared through here as through a sluice. Old signs, thick with bird droppings, warned against swimming.

      Strong athletes, with white teeth and golden arms, had disappeared here. Once, the inlet sucked a pair of doctors out to sea. They spent a whole night in open water, their eyes swollen shut from the salt. They removed their trousers and tied off the legs, like we learned in Boy Scouts, making improvised life vests. Blinded, they didn’t know they were safe until the incoming tide thrust them back on the beach.

      Low tide had revealed the vast sandbar jutting more than a mile out from the beach. The very tip of this peninsula verged on deep water—our destination. We lifted the rear gate of the Jeep and chose our rods for the day from the quiver running the length of the interior. We took a five-gallon bucket full of tackle and a red Igloo cooler. The latter was faded the color of an old brick, loaded with ice and bait, bottled water and Coca-Cola.

      My father spent much of his childhood on the water in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Skiing, fishing, boating. However, we would not own a boat until later in high school, when one of his friends gave us a hard-worn old ski boat he couldn’t sell. So, the fishing of my youth was mainly this: surf fishing.

      We crossed a boardwalk to a strip of soft sand that crunched like snow under our feet. Here, beachgoers lay on their towels, oil-glazed under the sun, their bodies baking like Krispy Kreme donuts. We descended these postcard sands and crossed a wide stream, ankle-deep, at the foot of the beach. This was a minor branch of Gould’s Inlet, dividing the upper beach from the vast expanse of the sandbar.

      On the far side of the stream, the sand became immediately darker, harder, rippled by hydraulic action. The ground was strangely cool beneath our feet, as if we were walking on the bottom of the sea. At any time but low tide, we would be.

      We walked and walked across this vast desert of sand—wave-ridged, hard as stone, like the surface of an alien world. We splashed through tidal pools, piss-warm, where tiny schools of baitfish shot back and forth in their formations, trapped by the outgoing tide. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead, trailing us like a shrimp boat. From a distance, we must have looked like bizarre pilgrims, burdened with our jangling array of rods and nets and tackle. Our boonie hats squirmed and flopped in the breeze, trying to lift from our heads.

      My feet hurt, hurt, hurt. I was born with clubfeet, my ankles twisted so that my soles met like praying hands. Straightening them had necessitated a slew of reconstructive surgeries—the most recent just three months before, right after school got out. My summer, so far, had been morphine drips and bedpans, sponge baths and paperbacks and balsa-wood model airplanes. A month ago, I had watched my doctor remove a six-inch pin from the heel of my left foot with a pair of vice-grip pliers.

      The sand here, hammered into such stony ridges, throbbed through my soles. I focused into the distance, the creamy roll of the breakers, where the sandbar dropped like a shelf into deeper water. The sea looked nearly black beyond the surf, flecked with silver shards of sun.

      When I think of the water of the Georgia coast—my home—I think of shadow and murk. Mystery. Four blackwater rivers empty their mouths along the seaward edge of the state, including the “Amazon of the South,” the Altamaha. That mighty river, undammed, is storied for torpedo-size sturgeon and alligator gar—armored fish which slink through the lightless currents like prehistoric relics. Then there’s the famed sea monster of the coast, the Altamaha-ha, which haunts my second novel, The River of Kings.

      The Altamaha delivered the alluvium that built these barrier islands, raising them over eons from the sea. The same dark sediment muddies the water here, so that the palm of your hand, spread pale and flat beneath the waves, will disappear just six inches beneath the surface. In the shallows, you never know where your next step will fall. Such water breeds mystery, legend. Fear.

      We kept trudging across the expanse, reaching the foamy slurp of the waterline. Soon we were cradled in the surf, belly-deep, casting our lines. White shreds of bait—squid—flew like tiny ghosts from our poles, twisting and fluttering through the air. They landed beyond the shelf of the bar. They sank into the darkness, their pale flesh hiding the stainless gleam of hooks.

      Green mountain chains of surf rose before us, again and again, only to tumble and crash in our wake, lathering the sands in foam. Soon my pain began to dissipate. I was lightened. I rode the swells with my hips, bouncing from the bottom in slow motion. I had the strange buoyancy of an astronaut.

      In reality, I didn’t care much about catching fish. For me, on the walk out, this outing had ceased to be about fishing or adventure or even friendship. It had become a test. The same as most any outdoor concert or school dance or Boy Scout hike—anything that required me to stand or walk for longer than an hour. I didn’t care about the fish, like I didn’t care about the band or the football game or the destination of the trail. I cared about getting it done, the same as everyone