It's 11:30 PM and I just turned the TV off. The house is quiet and I hear only the lonesome sound of a train crawling by. I can't see the train but I know it's there. It's a mile away; past manicured lawns on quiet suburban streets. Past blooming Dogwood trees signaling the beginning of Spring. Past an entire city of sleeping human beings. That big steel beast is coming in from the west just ahead of cold front that's bringing large volumes of rain.
The beast will continue it's eastward journey, exiting the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee and powering into the rolling hills, forests and farmlands of north Mississippi. Hundreds of tons of train will roll along on cold steel rails, taking that freight through small towns like La Grange and Grand Junction, TN. It's lonely horn won't wake anyone at the hour of it's arrival. It will snake through the swampy bottoms of Big Hill Pond, making owls and raccoons aware of it's presence as those big diesel engines rumble through the swamp. It'll roll into Corinth, Mississippi sometime around 3:00 AM. Then it will continue through the dark of night into the hills of East Mississippi where it will cross the TomBigbee Waterway, perhaps crossing over a barge that's moving a different load of freight down to the coast. Just a few more miles and that big train will cruise over a long, low, wooden trestle bridge that spans the southern reaches of Bear Creek on Pickwick Lake.
That train is carrying more than freight tonight my friends. It's carrying my mind eastward to Bear Creek. A creek 12 miles long, a mile wide, and loaded with large and smallmouth bass. Tonight under that dark, cloudy sky, the train crosses a body of water loaded with hundreds of thousands of pre-spawn bass. Like the train, the bass too are traveling a well defined and scheduled route at the moment. Theirs leads from deep winter haunts, to warmer, shallow flats where they will spawn. Some of them will take a journey that includes a trip to my boat, and into my memories.
As I drift off to sleep tonight with a raging storm outside, my dreams will ride that train to Pickwick, and I'll be setting the hook in my sleep all night.
