The Nature Of Nature

   Several years ago, when I first taught Jackson to fly fish, we used to drive down to a specific stretch of the Guadalupe River just a mile or so from the house and wade upstream to fish for Panfish and Bass. About 100 yards from our point of ingress was a small little 90-degree switchback that had formed a VERY soft sandbar just underneath the surface of the water on one bank. So soft in fact that if you sat down, the wet sand would literally form around your body like a well-made pair of slacks. During the summer, I would take a seat in this particular spot to cool off from the heat while Jack continued to fish every nook and cranny of this little series of bends. Watching him work those panfish over with a 2wt. is one of the great memories of my fishing life, and one I will remember in vivid detail until my days on planet earth are through. About 3 years ago, however, a powerful flood came through and totally reshaped most of the less permanent features of the river, and this particular spot was one of them. The triple swithcback has been straightened out, and the soft sandbar is totally gone. It's completely unrecognizable now and bears virtually no resemblance to the spot that I described in the previous paragraph.

  While the fact that the aesthetics of this location are gone forever, and probably only remembered by Jackson and I, it is the "nature of nature" to be, for better or for worse, in a constant state of change. Ask anyone who lives in a coastal community about the effects that even a small Category 2 hurricane has on both the natural and artificial features of an area, and they will tell you that there is no such thing as permanence in a coastal area. After Hurricane Harvey came through in 2016, the complete underwater topography was radically altered forever. Entire reef systems were reshaped and in some cases completely destroyed. But the favt is that the reef systems we had all been fishing for the past 50 years were the result of some other catastrophic change from the last giant hurricane in the early 1970s.

  I suspect that part of the reason I became so interested in photography a decade or so ago was to attempt to document so many of the places where I have made some very profound memories. Much of the time I spent hunting and fishing in my youth was at locations that are no longer recognizable due to human encroachment and development. The ones that remain have more often than not changed ownership or are no longer accessible through the same means that they were when we had access to them. It was in fact just last week that my dad and I were discussing the possibility of gaining access to a lake south of San Antonio where we used to fish and duck hunt, just to see how much it had changed in the 30-plus years since we were there last. In my heart I know it's not going to look remotely close to how it did in 1978, and I can deal with that. My best hope would be that by re-visiting those places that were so profound in my youth, that a few more details from the old days may be uncovered from the banks of my memory.

Even though the nature of nature is to evolve...and not always to our liking, the important thing is that as sportsman, we were privileged enough to encounter a specific place at a specific time, and create memories doing what we love. And for that, we should be grateful.

Hope you all are staying safe and healthy,

Andy