FAIR HOPE OF SUCCESS

THIS COASTAL ALABAMA TOWN MAY NOT BE UTOPIA. BUT IT'S PRETTY NEAR PERFECT FOR ME

IT ALL STARTED WITH A BOAT RIDE. I remember the vessel was a goodlooking Caribiana with a wicked, rakish bow. A long, narrow craft, it seemed too skinny for a big man...or a clumsy one. It heeled when I moved to starboard and when I shifted to port. I was a little uneasy even before we untied from the dock at Big Daddy's Grill. Leave it to my old friend, the writer Sonny Brewer, to buy a boat so easy to fall out of. "No bull sharks in this river that I know of," he told me. "But alligators? Oh, yeah." I found a good, steady place right in the middle, and we idled into the flat calm of the Fish River, headed for Weeks Bay. It has been 20 years, but I can still see the Caribiana's high bow split the water like a knife.

I don't know if it was a good boat to fish from, since we never even tried. We just rode and told stories and lies. I remember how the thick trees clung to the dark water and that, if you moved fast enough, you could outrun the humidity and the biting yellow flies. After a while, we turned in a slow are to go back. On impulse, I plunged one hand into the river, like a child feeling for the breeze through a car window.

The water was as warm as blood on the surface but icecold deeper down, as if the river had a tunnel in it that led someplace new. It probably had to do with currents, tides, or underground springs-or maybe just some kind of weird South Alabama swamp magic. You'll believe things on a river you wouldn't on a sidewalk. I guess it doesn't really matter now. It was just one more little story, one more scrap of mystery in what I would come to see as a charmed city here on the Eastern Shore along Mobile Bay. Even the name of it sounded made-up, like something from an old children's story: Fairhope.