Fishing in the Evening

Fishing in the Evening, originally uploaded by Delany Dean.

Last night, after dinner, I grabbed the camera and headed down the sea wall towards town, because the sunset was turning spectacular, and I knew the light would be wonderful. There are almost always people fishing off the seawall in Sanford; it's easy, just bring a chair or a bucket, and your fishing stuff. Pull up the car, get out, start fishing. In a sense, I was fishing, too: I caught these two, just as they pulled up their truck and got ready to throw out their lines.

Thousands of years ago, of course, other people were fishing in this lake; many of their old shell mounds were destroyed by invading and colonizing Europeans over the past several hundred years, and turned into roadways. There are a few left, one of them right smack beside Sanford Boat Works, the marina where my grandparents kept their boat, when I was a little girl. Back then, none of us paid any attention to it, nor did we even notice it. Even now, it doesn't have a fence around it. It's just a small hill with big trees growing out of it, and houses nearby. There's a sign explaining what it is, and forbidding anyone to dig.

The spot where these folks were fishing, about 5 blocks from my house, is the place where Fort Mellon once sat. The Fort was the very first European settlement here, where Sanford later became a town. Later on, there were steamboats up and down the St. Johns, a large resort on the other side of Lake Monroe, and Civil War naval skirmishes in the river, up north of Sanford.

There's something very beguiling, for me, about living beside a river/lake on which I can sense such a strong feeling of the human history that has played out here.