The Louisiana marsh does not look like fishing water. It looks like a lawn that flooded and got comfortable. Miles of gold spartina grass, cut by tidal creeks the color of strong tea, and somewhere in all that shallow nothing are the best-tempered fish on the Gulf Coast.
Our guide poled us in off the main cut at the bottom of the tide and told us to stop talking, which we took personally for about four minutes and then understood completely. In eight inches of water, sound arrives before you do. He stood up on the platform and did the thing every marsh guide does, went quiet, went still, and started reading a landscape that to us looked like one continuous field of grass.
"Tailing hour," he said. "Give it twenty minutes." He was off by four. At sixteen minutes a copper-bronze tail came up out of the water forty feet off the bow, waving in the low sun like it was flagging down a cab, while the fish underneath it rooted around in the mud for crabs with its whole face buried and its dignity fully abandoned.
The first cast was terrible. I want that in the record, because the guide has told this story since and has been generous about it. I lined the fish, the tail went down, and the marsh went back to being a lawn. Then, because Gulf Coast redfish are the most forgiving gamefish in North America, it came right back up thirty feet further along the same bank, doing the exact same thing, having apparently forgiven and forgotten within ninety seconds. The second cast landed a foot ahead of it. The tail dropped, the line came tight, and a redfish with a black spot the size of a coaster took off across the flat pushing a wake you could have surfed.
We got him alongside, admired the copper and the spot and the small furious eye, and let him back into the grass. The guide said he was "a nice one, not a big one," which on the Gulf Coast is a compliment with a mortgage on it. Somewhere in that marsh a fish is telling his side of the story, and in his version the first cast was even worse.