Before I get started, a quote from famed Americana writer Zane Grey:

Truly spoken.

I am not sure that adding to the already large library of non-fiction, fiction, short stories, articles, essays, movies, songs, memoirs, poems (the eloquent Irishman William Butler Yeats wrote The Fisherman in 1916) that correlate fly-fishing and writing is a wise use of time. Still, these two pastimes dominate much of my life so I still think I should take note of the deep connections between these two seemingly disparate occupations. This is a fancy way of saying I’m going to pile on to the probably already far too extensive outpouring of words on this fish and writing thing with my own two cents worth of personal observations.

First, an admission:

In the large body of work correlating the arts of fishing with feathers and setting down words on a page to tell a story, I suspect it is hard to improve on what is already well known although that observation never stops anyone from trying. I believe one can’t really delve psychologically deeper than Norman Maclean did with A River Runs Through It or the wonderfully admirable film Robert Redford made of that work. I have long considered that Tom McGuane’s collection The Longest Silence represents some of the finest writing on the near mystical conjunction between fishermen, time, nature, flies, and fish – and probes greater emotional truths equally well. And, for memoirs, it is difficult to top Howell Raine’s Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis. And, while I’m tumbling into this rabbit hole of titles, mention should be made of Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River and probably all the Nick Adams stories – because, short of Isaak Walton, they are undoubtedly the best place to start in this watery world. They make the wilds of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan come alive. For graceful and elegant prose, it is hard to surpass Steve Ramirez in Casting Forward. And I suspect, any dedicated fly fisherman reading this essay would immediately wonder, ‘Where is John Gierach, and his books Trout Bum or Sex, Death, and Fly-fishing on this short list?’

But, after recognizing all these fine writers (and countless others) and the heartfelt words that have flowed from their sharpened quills, ballpoint pens or #2 pencils, manual and electric typewriters, and various desktop, laptop maybe even hand-held computers, let me scramble down into the same river in a slip-sliding, butt-first, slightly-out-of-control fashion – because for me, the process of learning how to tell stories and learning how to cast a fly to wary fish were oddly paralleled.

I first came to fly fishing in my late 20s, a little backwards, because it seems most fishermen/writers start on trout or panfish as children, sense the magic of connection and steadily escalate to the bigger, more challenging fish that swim in ocean waters. Not my path. In the 1970s and 80s I had never even touched a fly rod and I was a reporter covering crime and punishment on the justly celebrated staff of what was then one of America’s greatest news institutions, The Miami Herald. This was before recent politicians called the press “the enemy of the people” amidst other such patently foolish and stupidly wrong-headed commentary. It was when trying to accurately understand the world we live in was a modest element of basic citizenship – not just falling back upon shouting an opinion as loudly as possible. This was my third newspaper gig. I’d started just out of college at the Trenton Times in New Jersey. Newspapers were probably my only real employment option; I was only equipped with my flimsy B.A. in English Literature from Bard College; I didn’t want to be an academic. I didn’t want to teach. I wanted to write. Not surprisingly, at age 22 I had very little to write about — other than being young and wanting to write which is rarely a good or marketable situation – so it is easy to see the post-graduation conundrum I found myself entrapped within. Despite my genuine wet behind the ears age, I still had the mental wherewithal to ask myself: Where better to learn about the world than the staff of an urban daily? Hello! Trenton. This was the city was where I saw my first murdered body and went to my first active crime scene, met my first serial killer, covered my first street riot, and first violent prison break and walked the sullen corridors of a state mental hospital for the criminally insane and where I got summarily fired after having what might be generously termed a “dispute” with a senior editor (more on that in other essays). I took that firing to be a part of my overall rough education in the vagaries and unfairness of life. I landed subsequently at the Miami News – that city’s decidedly second paper where a specialization in off-beat and unusual crime stories got me an offer from the bigger, better, and altogether fun place to work, The Miami Herald.

The Herald was in this huge, stolid tan-colored building right on the shoreline overlooking Biscayne Bay, Star and Palm islands (where Al Capone once had a home in real life and Tony Montana did in the movies) and where it wasn’t all that odd to occasionally see a manatee surface near the loading docks to remind us that even though we were surrounded by city, in Florida, nature is never far away. The cavernous newsroom was on the fifth floor – and although the primary offices were occupied by the top editors stealing the best views, the newsroom was still filled with light, and from my desk I could easily see out across the sweep of blue water to the glistening concrete towers on Miami Beach. A desk – I might add – I tried to occupy as little as possible – because if one was sitting around not doing much of anything, an assistant city editor was likely to spot you and sidle up and say something like, “Hey, John, can you make a few calls for me…”. I greatly preferred being out and about and hunting down my own stories — of which there were an endless number in Miami in that time. The city – right when Time Magazine assigned it the title Paradise Lost on its cover — was a repository for the violent, the cruel, the unusual, the bizarre and the unexpected, along with occasional spasms of unbridled and fascinating kindness, artistic moments, or delights of humor. Dade County housed a terrific mix – from Holocaust survivors out on Miami Beach still wearing the tattooed Arbeit Macht Frei camp identification numbers on their forearms, the Cuban exiles in Little Havana conspiring plans to oust Castro (which was never going to happen), sacrificial chickens, Voodoo and Santeria in Little Haiti and simmering anger and legitimate racial unrest in Overtown and Liberty City, at the same time as the sudden rise of the soon-to-be celebrated cocaine industry was just taking root. All this was coupled with official corruption right and left and a routine acceptance of the most unsettling types of daily violence. It was the perfect place to be a reporter – especially one that secretly harbored the desire to become a novelist. It was rich with stories.

Surrounded by reality, I dreamt of fiction.

But… fiction that was grounded in reality.

It never occurred to me to become a novelist of manners, of society, tell love stories or divorce stories or family stories or even horror stories, or aspire to be some sort of Tony Morrison, Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen beloved of the New York Times Book Review or New York Review of Books literary giant.

I wanted to write thrillers, because I believed they were the best way of writing about the world I knew. The “literary” stuff, I figured would either be there. Or not. I’d find out if I ever managed to come up with the right tale.

I was just searching for that path. I knew it was somewhere. I just had to uncover it.

And a fish – specifically a Bonefish – helped my discovery.

One afternoon while I was banging out a story about the typically unusual events I’d witnessed that day in the Dade County criminal courthouse, Carl Hiaasen – this was shortly before he became one of America’s greatest humorists and authors and back when he was only a terrifically skilled investigative and general assignment reporter with a wonderful descriptive touch in his prose — wandered by and asked, “Hey, John, would you like to go flats fishing?”

Carl occupied a desk three away from my own.

Of course, I instantly replied.

Except – I only had a vague idea what flats fishing was. I knew that it was in a smaller boat and shallower water – no long slog through deep waters out to the vast Gulf Stream (the joke out there is that the closest land is two miles away – that’s two miles straight down). I was vaguely aware that the elusive Bonefish – the aforementioned writer Zane Grey called it ‘the gray ghost of the flats’ — the mysterious and ever-frustrating Permit, and the ancient, immense, and muscular Tarpon were the targets.

I didn’t share my profound lack of knowledge with Carl.

Two days later, we met at Crandon Marina on Key Biscayne a little after daybreak on a warm, humid Miami summer Saturday morning. Barely a cloud in the already vibrant blue sky. The promise of unbridled heat pushing past the still damp morning air. Glassy dark water effortlessly slid into a light chop beyond the protected harbor docks. Streaks of sunlight slashed across the few waves as greens and blues melded seductively in Biscayne Bay. Florida born and raised, probably with a large portion of saltwater coursing through his veins; Carl owned an 18-foot Hewes Bonefisher – the skiff preferred back then by just about every professional guide. He backed his trailer expertly into the slip, disdained any offers of help from Mr. Naivete, tied off the boat, went and parked, came back with a bag of twitchy shrimp he emptied into what I learned was “a live well” where they were kept alive – for the time being. Sartre, Malraux, and Camus and the other Post-war, French Existentialists who thought man’s only real choice in life is to decide whether to commit suicide or not… should have deeply considered the shrimp’s plight. A shrimp’s life is a very philosophical existence: Enjoy what we can in the short span allotted to us. They know deep in their shrimp cores that just about everything in the ocean – and plenty of people walking about on dry land — want to eat them. So, when Carl dumped them into the live well, presumably they were already contemplating imminent shrimp demise and wondering what they’d done to deserve their fate. Perhaps they were already resigned to their circumstances.

Like I said: existential.

Possibly they believed in reincarnation and held out hope that they would come back as a higher form of life, like a sleek porpoise or an athletic gray wolf, at the same time they feared returning to this soil as something distinctly lower.

Insert political joke here. Democrat if you’re on the right. Republican if you’re on the left.

Carl hit the starter and the 75 horsepower Evinrude roared in happiness, as if thumbing a nose at the calm water surrounding us. Within seconds, we were flat out — thirty-five miles per hour, skimming across the bay, scooting dangerously around one blind mangrove corner on the edge of the key, heading towards a part of Biscayne Bay nicknamed Stiltsville. This spot’s name derived from the half-dozen small houses built on concrete pilings sunk into the shallows. These houses were designed to be weekend getaways for very wealthy types seeking privacy, skimpy bikinis easily shed by very young women, loud parties where no irritated neighbor can tell you shut the hell up as they wave a 9mm in their hand, abundant alcohol, blow and sunshine in equal quantities and who cavalierly ignored the fragility of the location when measured against the potential of hurricanes. Stiltsville was the sort of place no one with even a modest taste of environmentalism would allow today. But Miami, and much of Florida, has always embraced a certain outlaw ethos, and I guessed these houses represented some of that sensibility.

We slowed on a channel edge and Carl’s skiff drifted onto a skinny part sand, part marl grass flat that stretched for hundreds of yards. The Hewes would run happily through a foot and a half of water, maybe a little less. But at our hunting location in that depth, engines off and quiet was the order of the day. Carl showed me how to hook a live shrimp on the line at the end of a spinning rod, then he climbed up onto the poling platform, seized the long graphite pole and slowly pushed us into the midst of the flat, all the time quietly issuing instructions about what to look for and what to do if I saw a fish…

… Which I did.

This was – I later learned – something of a miracle.

The Bonefish’s silver tail waved seductively just above the water surface, as it rooted out a small crustacean from the sandy bottom for breakfast.

Carl said, “A couple feet in front so you don’t spook him with the splash.”

I followed instructions.

Waited.

Second miracle:

I felt the fish take the bait and…

… It screamed away.

Fifty yards. One hundred before it turned. Then it raced back towards me as I reeled frantically. Then off it went again. Back and forth for some period – I lost track how much time passed before it reluctantly came to the side of the boat, conceding defeat.

“Nice,” Carl said. A young man already equipped with an advanced sense of the sardonic, Carl could easily deliver a line with a comic’s dead-pan tone. “Pretty standard Biscayne Bay Bonefish. Five maybe six pounds.”

Standard? I thought. Standard! Are you kidding?

He gently released the fish, who swum away with a look of dismay on its snout, as if to say I can’t believe I got fooled by that guy….

But I was the one that was truly hooked.

“That was…” I was at a loss for the right words.

Damn incredible. I never imagined such an ordinary looking fish could hold such power, speed, and strength. It had sent electric shocks through my arms into my imagination.

Carl smiled. He knew. “My turn,” he said. He pointed at the poling platform with a good luck, rookie expression, as he pulled a nine-foot stick from beneath a gunnel. “I like the fly rod,” he said as I unsteadily clambered up onto the platform and seized the pole. “Try to keep it straight, and don’t fall overboard,” he added. He laughed when he said this. I believe he knew what my poling efforts would provide – a comic interlude. Erratic barely describes our path. First right. Then left. Never precisely straight for more than a couple of feet. More or less forward. At least I managed to not go backwards. Or fall off. And as I struggled to maintain some sort of poling composure, I watched as he stripped out line from the fly reel, started to gracefully false cast back and forth, then began to stare at the water, searching for our second fish of the day. It didn’t take him long. I saw him point, then shoot fifty feet of line and drop the fly in front of another tail.

The fish ate. And ran. And I thought there was something intimate in the way Carl had manipulated the rod and line in tight elegant loops and gentle in the way he deposited the fly in front of the hungry fish. And a second intimacy in the way fish and soon to be a beloved author of wildly dark humor struggled against each other.

And I said to myself:

We hooked up a couple more fish that day. Carl on the fly. Me on the less-than-elegant spinning rod attached to a soon-to-be-dead shrimp that I now considered distinctly second-best. Managed to nearly get stuck on one flat when the tide ran out behind us, requiring both of us to jump out and engage in a lot of pushing to get us free so we wouldn’t end up trapped for eight hours (until the tide came back in). Drank some beer and lots of cold water and delighted in slightly soggy sandwiches. Watched huge black thunderheads form miles away inland. Marveled at the array of blues and greens that adorn Biscayne Bay, the stately Miami skyline on the horizon – the modern world abutting the ancient. Finally went back to the marina as the sun faded around us. I was energized. And I already had a plan.

“So, Carl,” I asked innocently enough, “who do you think is the very best, most experienced fly-fishing guide in Miami who works these flats?”

“Easy,” Carl replied. “Bill Curtis. One eyed, thorny attitude, a legend around here. No one knows the bay better. The dean of fly-fishing guides.”

A few days later, I walked into the offices of Tropic Magazine.

Tropic was the Herald’s award-winning equivalent of The New York Times Magazine – only significantly more lively and considerably more inventive, incredibly popular, home to my (soon-to-be) wife, Maddy Blais the Pulitzer winner for the magazine, Dave Barry, the humorist (and eventually another Pulitzer winner), Doug Balz and Larry Bloom the editors with their own unique and off-beat ways of looking at South Florida and John Dorschner, a skilled writer, with his own eccentric manner of looking for stories (which would result one Sunday in a lengthy paean to the dusky seaside sparrow, a modest very non-descript bird in danger of extinction. Philip Brooker, the gifted art director drew sparrow tracks all over the magazine that issue).

When I entered, Larry and Doug looked up.

“What you need,” I told them forcefully, “is a front cover full detailed profile of Bill Curtis, the legendary fly-fishing guide on Key Biscayne. And I’m the guy to do it.”

To my surprise and delight, they rapidly agreed.

So did Bill when I called him.

I did not recognize it at that moment – although I probably should have — but that profile was when words and fish first blended in my imagination.

Bill and I spent a couple of days on the water, then seated around his modest dining room table in his small home on Key Biscayne as he told stories of old Miami, right after World War Two and fishermen like Ted Williams the ballplayer or Curt Gowdy the sports announcer, not to mention an impressive array of doctors, lawyers, actors, news anchors, artists and politicians who had taken up positions on the bow of his yellow-hulled skiff Grasshopper. He told tales of what it was like when Miami’s vibrant waters were still fish-filled and innocent – longtime residents like Meyer Lansky (Murder, Inc.) or visitors (Ted Bundy) notwithstanding. More Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners. Or Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and I Love Lucy.

He was the perfect image of a flats fishing guide.

Craggy face. Old-fashioned pencil-thin moustache. Sunburnt nose. Beaten up baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. Skin like the cliché: leather.

One-eyed. Lost one as a child. Got a dispensation to join the photography wing of the U.S. Army Air Force because he was an expert with a 35mm camera, then a second dispensation from the U.S. Coast Guard – who were understandably reluctant to license a boat captain with a single eye – until they were besieged by famous folks who’d fished with Bill insisting that a special rule be made for him. He was a wondrous concoction of charming, irascible, hot-tempered, prickly, and gnarly all at once. And generous, patient, devoted to wife and the nature he worked within. He said many things I recall:

First, he would often yell at a fisherman who blew a shot at a fish:

And if you tossed a fly too close to an approaching Bonefish, spooking them:

And:

They don’t. Spotting a Bonefish darting in and out of a mottled sea floor – remember that gray ghost description? – is not by any means the easiest thing in the world.

I know of some fishermen who would get one taste of Bill’s salty rough edges and swear never to get in a boat with him again.

And I know of far more who swore he was the greatest fisherman they’d ever met, constantly found trophy fish when others couldn’t, knew the Bay like it was his brother (in a way, it was) and his scatological approach was well-worth the experience.

I, frankly, never had a problem with him because when I blew a shot at a nice Bonefish and he started into a cascade of colorful obscenities to describe my new-found, inadequate fly-fishing skills, I simply turned around and said, “Tell you what Bill. Next story when I’m on deadline at the Herald and surrounded by editors yelling ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ you come in, plop yourself down in front of a computer and write it and I’ll tell you what I think of your writing style.” He guffawed with laughter, and we were friends from that point on.

The article I wrote for Tropic was headlined: Close to the Bone. The subhead was: A lifetime spent in shallow pursuits.

As I grew older, I often imagined that head and subhead could easily apply to my life’s work.

He showed me the rudiments of fly casting. He made me work at the rhythms of the presentation – the famous three-stroke, nine-to-eleven, let the back cast straighten out process that Maclean wrote about in his memoir of fly-fishing and family. My favorite fish of all time: A nine-pound bonefish that I remarkably spotted before Bill did, firing off a 60-foot cast and fly that landed two feet from the fish, directly in its path and which got an attaboy from Bill when the fish ate and zoomed off. For years I had a line burn on my thumb from that fish.

Many flats fishermen have Bill Curtis stories.

Some of them are probably true. Others… well, who knows? It is said that he – and his undying hatred of one other Miami-based guide who shall remain nameless – were the models for Thomas McGuane’s famous Key West fly-fishing and murder novel 92 in the Shade. You would have to ask McGuane about that.

Bill said two things to me, over the many years we fished together after that Tropic story, that I have never forgotten:

Once, we were fishing the Everglades and came around a corner deep in that mangrove forest, the famed river of grass, the Florida writer and environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas so eloquently described. There was a 12-foot alligator sunning himself on the swale, perhaps ten feet from the boat. The ‘gator didn’t budge and suddenly Bill gunned the engine. I grabbed hold of the nearest grip so as not to be tossed out of the boat, and we roared past the prehistoric and very toothy beast — who still didn’t move even one scale on his back as we flew by.

“Bill,” I asked when I’d recovered my breath, “what the Hell was that about?”

He grinned. Shrugged. “Seems to me,” he said, in his odd half-drawl that wasn’t exactly Southern, Northern, Eastern or Western, but was uniquely his, “that you kinda got to watch out for the one’s that just ain’t all that scared of you.”

Advice I have employed in many situations. An admonition that I endow in both plot and character development on the pages I am creating.

And another observation spoken about his love for fly-fishing in shallow waters, but which I have applied to years of writing:

“If you found out one day that you could make a living doing something that you loved doing, well, you’d be a damn fool not to continue doing it.”

Bill pretty much kept doing what he loved right up to his death in 2016.

I owe him and Carl a debt – because it was first on the front of a flats skiff, staring right and left into a couple of feet of opaque, crystal water, searching for the slightest indication that a Bonefish was within casting range, where I first felt that conjunction between those moments and the same search for characters, plots and stories that have made up my creative life. When I look deep into an idea, I see people I am familiar with, because they have long lurked just out of sight in my imagination and have now risen to a point where I can greet them and place them on a page. I recognize that they are caught up in events, problems that arrive in their lives, delivered by me, that demand their attention – much the same simple way I did on the bow of those boats. And for those characters caught up in the dilemmas inherent in the plot of a novel, extrication is often as challenging as launching a fly in front of a skittish, wary Bonefish. The wind makes it harder to be accurate. Shadows as clouds cross the sky make it harder to spot the target. The dark spots in the flats grass make it harder to see movement. But every so often one can overcome all that and land that fly right where it is intended to be. And that is what happens in a novel – if the magic works right. The same obstacles – types of winds, clouds, shadows, and deep doubts all conspire to make storytelling difficult – and it is solving the problems laying on the page in front of you that makes storytelling so rewarding. If it was easy – writing or fly-fishing – it wouldn’t be nearly so attractive.

To succeed at either, you must embrace and learn to love challenges. Even the most difficult or elusive ones. Especially the ones that are hidden.

That was the thought in my mind when I wrote:

Those were the first words of my first novel.

A reporter. A killer. And Miami in the blistering summertime.

A story torn from my own newspaper life. That’s the case for many first novels; they jump enthusiastically from a personal intimacy. The issue – for any writer – is not just finding that first story that reflects what they have seen and heard and is decidedly personal. It is discovering a second story and then a third. Stories that just might not be so close to self.

Like fishing.

But…

Leave aside the many Bonefish, Tarpon, Permit (a couple, I’m proud to say, and I’m not lying, which most Permit fishermen sadly are forced to do), Snook, Barracuda and Redfish that I have cast a fly to successfully over many years while dancing on top of small waves in small boats in shallow saltwater.

It was a large Brown Trout rising to sip down a drowned terrestrial on the famous Battenkill River outside Manchester, Vermont that cemented the confluence of fly-fishing and writing in my imagination and where I learned to rely on invention, not solely experience.

Now equipped with a very young family, I’d moved to Western Massachusetts because my wife had been offered a faculty position in a distinguished journalism program at a nearby university and I, the newly minted novelist, was considered portable. The small college town where we landed was the diametric opposite of Miami. Large local issues included whether to put speed bumps on one side street because students drove too fast down it when they were late for class. Or was there enough space downtown for another Chinese restaurant? Or Pizza parlor? Or when students gathered for the annual Saint Patrick’s Day green-colored beer-fest locally called The Blarney Blow-out, did it pose a safety hazard? (The answer to this last one was yes. Of course it did. Because they were all shit-faced drunk at three in the afternoon.) But overly imbibed undergrads publicly urinating on front lawns were a far cry from Cocaine Cowboys littering streets with shell casings ejected by automatic weapons and leaving behind blood-strewn sidewalks.

It seemed – at first – that all the fiction-writing energy stemming from my environment had been stripped from my life.

My first novel had been set in Miami.

My only non-fiction work was about a crime that occurred in Miami.

My second novel – which financially extricated me from the newsroom and set me free to write fiction – started in Miami, had characters from Miami and was written in Miami.

The little college town we’d moved to had no passion. At least, none that I could readily identify. What it abundantly had was a whole lot of tweedy intellectualisms, academic thinking, advanced degrees in many disciplines other than homicide, inexpensive white wine served in plastic glasses, and hummus. Crimes were modest: jaywalking. Rowdy behavior. Fist-fights or snowball attacks, an occasional sexual assault (when upper class men would prey on incoming first-year women) that would be rapidly covered up by college and university administrations afraid of bad publicity.

I hated it.

Utterly.

But – solely from my side of the equation. I recognized it was a genuinely welcome spot for my wife, who had embraced teaching, comfortable in a place very close to where she had grown up. My children were growing, making friends right and left and undeniably thriving. Even the dog we’d acquired romped happily. Unlike South Dixie Highway and Interstate 95, which slice dangerously through Miami inviting high-speed chases and random gunfire, there wasn’t any traffic to speak of on the stately quiet, tree-lined streets and absolutely no dead bodies lying about – to my deep regret.

But I was alone in that regret. Everyone close to me was happy.

It seemed like the sources – the very motors – for my fictions had been ripped away from me, replaced by ordinary. And dull. And uninteresting. I couldn’t see a book. Any book. No stories leapt out the way they did every day in Miami.

This is a truism: one of the greatest fears any writer faces is the abject terror that they won’t see a story. No matter how much acclaim and respect one has earned, the world of writing is always about what’s next? And can you match what you’ve already done and exceed it?

Well, can you?

These nasty thoughts reverberated within me and were coupled with the realization that in the over-educated world I now found myself lurking on the periphery, the sorts of books I had written and wanted to continue writing were seen as lesser. Or perhaps, unworthy. They were decidedly not oblique, incomprehensible, over-written and literary enough. If this sounds like a kind of snobbishness, well, it was.

So, I lobbied hard to return to Miami. The Herald would welcome our return enthusiastically. After some heart-felt conversations, the decision to return was made. Months out from any actual move, we arranged schools for our children. Put down a deposit on a nice house. Started to call moving companies for estimates.

And the more all the machinations of this return were put into place, the more troubled I was about the decision.

The edgy violence and underlying tension in Miami were fine for me. I was accustomed to them. I embraced them. No big deal.

But was that true for wife? Young children?

Dog?

The answer was not the same.

In the afternoons, deeply concerned by what seemed a unilateral, wrong-headed decision on my part, I would go out into our yard with my fly rod. I put a target out at forty feet and another at sixty feet. Repeating every lesson that Bill Curtis had shown me, I practiced. Back and forth. Over and over. Learning the rhythm of the cast, imprinting it onto muscle memory. Learning how to compensate for the wind. I got so I could hit those targets more often than not. I told myself I was prepping for a return to the bow of a flats boat, hunting for another wary and elusive Bonefish. But… at the same time, I knew that I was surrounded by well-known trout rivers. Some of these streams were even famous subjects for authors and artists. It seemed to me that the Bonefish in Biscayne Bay represented one part of my life. And the trout nearby might suggest another – and I would be a fool not to explore that possibility.

So, on one fine early summer day, riven with doubts and unruly concerns about decisions I recognized I had unfairly imposed on my family, I drove several hours up to Manchester, Vermont, where the first and still primary Orvis store is located very near the famed Battenkill River. Orvis, along with Sage and Simms and Winston and G. Loomis and many others are purveyors of all sorts of fly-fishing items. At that time, I was equipped with an inexpensive, beginner’s trout fly rod and reel and a pair of cheap, bulky waders. At the Orvis store I purchased some leaders and tippet and a handful of trout flies – just enough so that the guy at the counter would steer me in the right direction with a ‘Good luck, fella’ glance. It didn’t take me long to find a turn-off by the river, rig up and scramble down into the rushing cold water.

And I started to lay just about every fly I’d acquired on the rippling water surface – sure that somewhere – I didn’t have even the slightest clue where other than in the water – there might be a trout lurking, which would be my first of the species. I could feel the Battenkill wrapping around my legs, nudging me every second, gravelly bottom slippery beneath my feet. The only sounds were the river swirling around rocks and a light shuffle from the breeze sliding through tree branches. Afternoon gold light crept slowly across the dark water, glistening. I was profoundly alone.

Ten casts. Twenty casts. I’d gingerly move a few feet, trying hard not to lose my balance and dunk myself in the chilled stream. Change the angles that the flies were drifting.

And…

Nothing.

And while I fruitlessly cast, several things started to fill my body and my imagination.

First – an unfortunately familiar, nasty, scratchy, throat-tightening sensation, joined with a sense of heat pouring through head to toes. The inevitable early signs of a nasty summer flu arriving and the certain knowledge that I was about to get sick and maybe very sick.

Second – as every fly landed impotently on the water surface, that my desire to head back to Miami was being rash and selfish, and totally unfair to wife, children, and dog. They were happy. They embraced this new world for all of us in the center of an old New England world. The streets where I now lived were named after poets. In Miami, they were named after massacres. And that led me to think that if I really claimed to be a thriller writer, I should be able to find a story wherever I was.

As all these harsh doubts, thoughts, ideas, and confusions raced around within me, merrily joining with the onset of that summer flu to create a kind of delirium, I saw a small splash some forty feet upstream. Just the slightest disruption in the regularity of the river flow. I turned that direction, resisted the urge to instantly fire off a cast, and kept watching. A few seconds later, the trout rose again. Unmistakable.

The last remaining fly in my inadequate box was the simplest, most basic fly of all:

A black ant.

A favorite bite for an eager trout when the unlucky insect falls into the river.

I tied it on. Improved clinch knot. Pretty basic.

Two or three false casts to get the line moving and then I dropped the fly a few feet above where I saw the fish rise. A most lucky cast from Mr. Inexperienced, as the fly line splashed down to the side, away from where the fish was rising, so he wouldn’t be lined and warned of my presence. Later I would learn this was the unplanned equivalent of a reach cast and very valuable in Idaho on the Snake River, Colorado’s Frying Pan or in Montana on the Missouri, Madison, or the Yellowstone. The fly drifted over the right spot, and the trout rose up and smashed it. I set the hook and felt the weight of the fish on the line. A brown trout’s fight, I would learn in the next instant, is dogged and dynamic. Not as acrobatic as its Rainbow or Brook trout brothers, but deeply admirable in its steely determination. Not nearly as strong as any of my familiar saltwater targets – but the tackle was substantially lighter, the strands between me and the fish gossamer thin and the challenge as profound. The brown’s fight was fierce in its own fashion. It battled to get free with ancient determination. A knight. A brave. A samurai. A Marine. The fish raced back and forth, splashing wildly at the surface, then descending to the bottom, only to soar up again…

… Which is precisely where it threw the hook from its jaw with a sudden, violent shake of its head.

It won.

I lost.

The river seemed to chuckle as it returned to its steady, dark undisturbed flow.

I tried a couple more desultory casts in the forlorn hope that some other trout might be interested in an adventure, all the time feeling my about-to-be flu-ridden-self begin to ache and my temperature start to spike. Knowing I had a couple of hours drive ahead of me before I could climb into bed and experience the usual one second boiling, the next freezing, illness, I reluctantly scrambled from the water.

But before leaving, I looked back at the Battenkill.

I felt something strangely similar, yet something separate from what I’d experienced on the bow of those flats boats with Bill yelling or Carl laughing at me. In front of me was something hidden. Something elusive. Something desirable. And, I recognized, each trout, like each Bonefish, was a different story, waiting to be told. I felt the cool air around me and listened to the steady modest rush of the river a few feet away. It had a seductive music, a poetry of its own, quite different from the azure Bay waters I’d known before. It enticed me with promise. And, in that second, I decided two things:

First, the practical. I told myself: Don’t move back to Miami. That city and its stories would always be available to me. What I saw, what I heard, what I came to understand about Miami was locked in memory and accessible at any time.

Second, more elusive, but equally important: Just like that trout concealed beneath the surface of the Battenkill, there were stories awaiting me where I was. I just had to work harder to find them. I walked back to my car, thinking about that trout. And as I climbed behind the wheel, sick and fast getting sicker and knowing that I might be right and just as equally could be wrong about the decision I’d just rashly made, I considered what I’d seen that evening on the river.

It might be laughable to contend that a single Brown trout swimming in one of Vermont’s most famed streams could encourage me to make such a pair of dramatic decisions, one about life and where I was going to live…

… And another, about creativity.

Because at that moment a story came to me.

One that reflected this new world.

For lack of a better term:

Trout World.

In my mind’s eye, I suddenly saw a middle-aged couple – husband and wife – but onetime committed left-wing radicals — hiding from their violent anti-war past in a small New England college town – very similar to the one I now lived in. This fictional couple were embracing normalcy. Ensconced in routine. Striving to forget what they wanted to believe were just youthful indiscretions – even if those indiscretions had resulted in deaths and prison terms for others. I saw the concordant flows of lingering guilt and blissful innocence passing through years. And I knew this couple that leapt into my imagination at the side of that river would be supremely ill-equipped when their past re-visited them seeking vengeance. I could envision the residue of who they once were, careening into the future that they hoped to own. It was a story that jumped from the college town New England environment I so capriciously had wanted to abandon.

That story became my third novel. Day of Reckoning. It remains one of my favorites. It has successfully traveled all over the world in many languages.

Other works have followed. Just as every fish is different, I try to embrace variety in storytelling. From an editorial writer who falls into a killer’s Death Row trap, to prisoners of war in World War Two to a New York psychoanalyst who makes a single, deadly mistake with a patient when he is just starting out. I have explored schizophrenics, Holocaust survivors, and alcoholic graduate students as well as plumbing a variety of killers in my books. I’m well into double figures, now.

I’ve set books in Miami. From downtown across to Miami Beach, and back South to Coral Gables. From there, to the Everglades and down past Islamorada and through the Keys – scenes adjacent to the same waters where I have hunted Bonefish, Permit and Tarpon. On the other hand, some of my stories have New England roots. Near to places where I have tried to entice a trout into mistakenly gracing the end of my fly line: From Vermont covered bridges that traverse busy streams and Northern Maine ice and cold, to Boston and Cambridge’s Harvard Square, out to the Berkshires that are celebrated in James Taylor song and down to Cape Cod (Striper fishing territory). As my writing years have passed, I have discovered that I have three homes: South Florida. New England. And the water, with a fly rod in hand.

And a few things I have embraced over the years crafting these tales and hunting for fish:

Here are my very few rules:

If it is a fish, be determined to put the fly in just the right spot. Maximize my chances. Take all that is around me – the sun, sky, breeze, flow of river or tides across a flat – and listen to all that nature is telling me in order to accomplish the desired end: That tug on the line and explosion of energy.

If it is a story, bring the same determination and concentration to the telling. Hone it. Sharpen it. Work on it until it is truly told, so that, when I reach the final pages and the final few words, I can feel that I have neither cheated myself, nor any reader.

And then, the most critical rule of all:

That was the approach I unwittingly learned when I was a reporter when I was young, and then shortly after, when I became a young novelist. It just took me years to fully understand what I’d acquired. And that lesson remains just as true today, even if I am now older, and presumably wiser (but who really knows if that’s correct?) about the craft of storytelling or the art of dropping a fly in front of a hungry set of jaws. I am aware that there is always a deadline – whether it is minutes away or months in the future and whether it is an anxious editor, or one’s own internal clock or instinct taking over in that tiny fish brain to tell it something is just not quite right about that thing it was getting ready to eat.

When I think of all those times – hours spent fishing and months spent writing books – each enjoy significant prominence in my memory. I welcome each recollection. But I also recognize they are both the stories and the fish past. They might glow for me with a momentary self-congratulatory sense of achievement, or they might arrive with a twinge of regret, because they became the fish lost or the story unrealized. But those histories – both the good and the not-so-good — never supplant the fish or story that is next, because that Bonefish, Tarpon, Trout, Silver Salmon, Striper, or Thriller Novel just might be the best yet. Writing and fishing for me are inextricably entwined in the nicest fashion possible: Both activities are always endowed with hope.

February-April, 2024