text: The July humidity continued to hang across Delmarva’s Ayers Creek this Friday long after the sun set and the full moon encased the area in its heavenly glow. The hot moisture imprisoned the lone fisherman floating his kayak along the surface like a straight jacket. Yet Dr. Fulbright at first had embraced the relatively minor discomforts of the eerie evening. He thought they would provide a quiet retreat from the pandemic-induced terror he had faced in six months of 18-hour work days. During his breakneck service at Atlantic General Hospital he had pulled patient after patient back from the brink of death from Covid 19. The physician had welcomed the overdue weekend outing. Also, to his relief, not a creature had stirred in the pre-dawn hours as he eased his rented kayak into the then cool waters. He had joyfully cast his line into the creek on the hunt for some of the prime perch he knew populated this Eastern Shore retreat. As the day began to move along peacefuly, Fulbright had laid back with his trusty fisherman’s cap pulled over his eyes to shield him from the rapidly-rising sun. He slowly had settled into what he thought would turn into a peaceful escape from the over-scheduled life of a country doctor just recovering from the forced march battling the forces of the Grim Reaper. In his role as one of the area’s more experienced medical personnel, the medical center’s senior adminsitrator constantly thrust into the healthcare system’s front lines. This forced him to alternate between scouring his tool chest of modern medical science for pre-vaccination cures and chasing down miracle fixes proposed from every corner of the Internet. In the infrequent breathers from his medical duties, he also had played comforter-in-chief to those whose loved ones had fallen victim to the plague. Additionally, the experience he acquired during the pandemic made it necessary for him to appear on the various forms of social media to battle sceptics carrying on a continual battle to discredit the science about the origins of the disease and fact-based methods to fight it. Far too many close encounters with severe illness and death had taken their toll on the physician’s quickly-aging, battle weary body. Long overdue for a vacation, with thoughts of retirement becoming more frequent, he surely had earned the right to enjoy an uneventful encounter with nothing more than an over-enthusiastic fish trying to avoid becoming his pre-weekend dinner. Time to let the solitude percolate through his psyche and wait for the first nibble on his line. With little action from under the water to keep him awake, a few sips of beer and the heat of the afternoon caused him to doze off for several hours with the sun setting and the full moon rising. Suddenly, something shook him awake as he grabbed for his fishing pole and the craft drifted into the darker reaches of the creek. Then the boat took off. It felt like someone had attached a winch to the rear of his kayak and pulled him through the water at the speed of a top-of-the-line outboard motor. Fulbright put a death grip on the sides of his craft--holding on for dear life. Then, a fish attached to his fishing pole bolted out of the creek ahead of him several inches above the surface. It was the most gigantic Maryland perch he had ever seen, easily weighing 100 pounds. Fulbright struggled to hold onto his pole and stay in the kayak at the same time. The sea creature dragged the small craft to every corner and every depth of the lunar-illuminated lake. Then the boat crashed headlong into the kayak rental dock and his craft splintered into pieces, leaving him treading water as the fish flung itself back into the water. Jim Michaelson, who owned the kayak rental franchise, had waited up long past closing time out of concern for the town’s most respected doctor-and his business. He pulled Fulbright out of the drink and onto dry land. “What the heck happened to you and look what you’ve done to my boat and my dock.” “Didn’t you see the gigantic perch that dragged me around the creek?” Jim said he had only seen the kayak crashing bow-first into the pier, splintering both the launching area and the craft to pieces. After checking to see that the fray had not injured the doctor, he informed Fulbright that, heroic doctor or not, the fisherman would have to pay for the dock and kayak replacement. That would cost him about $1000 plus construction costs for a new launching area. The physician lifted his sore body off the ground and changed into some dry clothes he had in his car. He then prescribed a strong dose of reality for himself. He agreed with Michaelson that he probably couldn’t reasonably explain what had happened to him. Then he came up with three theories: Either he guzzled more Corona Light than he thought he did, leaving him in a drunken dreamstate, or The experiments they were doing several miles away on Wallops Island emptied something into the water that drastically altered the natural order of things in Ayers Creek, Or he had stumbled into an alternative universe that promised to drastically alter life as he knew it in Berlin, MD. Maybe Fulbright suffered from the lingering effects of the just-departed Covid 19 virus that he had contracted from a patient. In any event, the launch area and the kayak still stood in front of him in ruins and he faced a repair bill that would put a huge hole in the retirement account he had just opened. Maybe if he sold his story to Sports Illustrated that would cover part of the cost. Then again, if many in the non-sports media didn’t believe him when he had scientific data to back him up would the sports media believe a fish story with only a wrecked boat and launch area to prove what he was telling them?