The Water and Walter Coles

Walter Coles Burroughs leans against the rattling engine box, takes a careful sip of scalding coffee and looks across the flat green water he knows will always be there. But for the water, everything changes, God knows, even down here at the distant tip of Mathews County, Virginia, where the land doesn't so much end as flatten and soften, until it finally succumbs to the inevitability of water. Where ten houses and two families can make a town. Where the wedge of land knuckling into Dyers Creek known as John's Point—named for Walter Coles's grandfather—has been home to Burroughses and Hudginses just as long as anyone has ever been able to remember. Roots this deep can hold some comfort. Walter Coles (that's what everyone calls him, given name and middle) was born here, raised here, schooled here. He married here, raised a family, and has worked his pound nets here. He will, he reckons, die right here, too. But anyone who lives on this tenuous fragment of earth knows a storm tide can still heave a casket right out of the churchyard, and a strong wind can lay a loblolly right down. After all, Walter Coles will point out, it was a Burroughs who built the sandstone lighthouse out there on New Point Comfort back in 1804, and when he did the sand dunes running out to the light were tall enough to nearly eclipse the beam. Miles and miles of them, solid waves of sand, fuzzy with live oaks. Gone now. Just the lighthouse left standing on a scrap of rock, alone. The Lord put that land there, boy, and He can take it away. Just like He did Walter Coles's daughter, Thelma Lynn, when she was just twenty-five. Leukemia. Just like He did his wife, Dot. Alzheimer's. Walter Coles leans against the engine box, sips his coffee and, for the hundredth time this day seems like, tries not to cry. Eventually, he sighs and fixes his eyes at the flat green water that spreads out before him like rippled glass. It's an uncommonly peaceful day for November, warm and calm. "I reckon I'm selfish or somethin' cause you know what?" Walter Coles says, shedding his jacket. "If I could screw a clamp on it or somethin' I'd do it right now. This suits me." Tomorrow the Bay might be mean as a junkyard dog. Or not. But the water is always there.

Walter Coles is seventy-four and has been a pound net fisherman pretty near his whole life. His blue eyes are clear, his hair is white, his hands are rough and gentle all at once, and if you ask him, he'll say he's old. Forgetful. His daddy was a pound net fisherman before him, his uncle too. Mathews County, in fact, was the first place on the Chesapeake a pound net was ever set well enough to catch anything worth noticing. A man by the name of Snediker came down here from Long Island and in 1875 set a pound net off New Point. When the locals saw how much he hauled in, they cut down his nets and ran him out. Before long, though, they started setting nets themselves. Walter Coles recalls nets so thick off New Point you had to snake your way through them. Boats coming into the wharf at Sand Bank wallowed with fish. That wharf's gone too, now, nothing but a bunch of pilings sticking up from the bottom like a row of rotten teeth. Walter Coles and his son Ronald are among the very few left working nets in Virginia. It takes a solid crew of men to work a pound net, and steady labor is harder to come by every day. So are fish and the market to sell them. Friend of his down in Gloucester who had a big...