No Regrets (A Piece of Fiction)

Written by Jay Zimmerman

Joe knew he had to stay awake to stay alive. Saltwater stung his eyes, but apart from that discomfort the rest of his head and body were entirely void of any feeling at all. Even the tight aching in his scalp had long faded. The chills and shivering were over with, too. The first few times the irritation in his eyes had gotten bad he had tried to wipe away the salt spray using his thumbs. They were the only two digits left usable in the mitten-like hands of the bright orange survival suit he wore. But touching his sensory-less face made him more than just uncomfortable. His skin felt lifeless and uninviting. Now he just squinted his eyes tight for a moment and rolled them. It relieved only briefly.

Joe no longer harbored any fantasies about saving himself. If he were to live he was going to have to be rescued. And the odds of that happening were waning fast, as were the brief hours of daylight. The Coast Guard had an airplane overhead earlier, a big orange-and-white C-130 banking low along the coast, lumbering back and forth, fighting the same wicked gale that assaulted the side of Joe’s numb face every time the frigid ocean lifted him up to the crest of another swell. The airplane had left without even coming close enough to bother waving at, and for a long time afterward Joe had told himself that it was just refueling and was sure to be back again to look for him. That assumption was gradually weakening.

But he could still see land. That was the only thing that kept the whole predicament bearable. Hell, that made it all a bit funny somehow. He snorted through nostrils he could no longer feel and laughed at himself. He felt detached, as though he could hover above somehow, up there where the airplane had been, but out of the wind. He could look down and laugh at the orange body floating with arms and legs spread like a dead frog in his father’s pond back home in Litchfield, Illinois.

He was alone in the water now, over a mile off the coast of Kodiak Island. What plight. It was almost November, almost winter. The mountains had been collecting snow for awhile and it wouldn’t be long, days possibly, before the entire island would be covered. All of coastal Alaska was cold, damp and miserable, and the seas were becoming even more unpredictably volatile. Smaller fishing vessels had been advised for weeks not to leave the sanctuary of their home ports.

There had only been the two of them aboard the 38-foot Sand Flea. Gary, the skipper, seemed to die quickly and relatively painlessly. Joe had seen him go into the water without wearing a survival suit. The older man had crawled up on deck clutching the suit, but had been thrown overboard before he could put it on. Once in the water Gary had only lasted minutes. Joe never had time to swim close enough to help. If it had been calmer water he could have kept his skipper alive for a half hour or so before hypothermia sucked the life from him. He may have even been able to get the man into his suit, but he couldn’t reach him. There wasn’t time. Gary stopped moving his arms, rolled face-down in the water and then slipped into the side of a swell. Joe never saw him again.

Joe had been flung over first. He was up on the flying bridge at the time with both hands tight to the wheel trying to have an effect on which way the vessel went. He wasn’t up there to steer, really, or to navigate – by that time it was pointless – he was merely the lookout. He was to yell down below to Gary when they got close to land. The plan was to somehow get into the lee of something, tie off and try to get ashore. That was Plan C, the contingency to the contingency. They had the anchor down, too, as a Plan B, all the way to the end of its chain and it, in theory, would catch and hold as soon as it touched bottom. They were hoping to be blown to a section of coast with a gradually sloping bottom contour. But the northern coast of Kodiak was not the best place to have that kind of bet riding.

Although, if Gary could get the engine running again – that was Plan A – the ordeal would end and be nothing more than a great adrenalin rush and another good fishing story. Gary had gotten the engine running after it quit the first time, so Joe had a lot of confidence, or he did until they got to within one-hundred feet or so of the steep, jagged shoreline. Joe saw small rock outcroppings appearing occasionally in the troughs of the breaking swells and knew then it was going to be up to himself or the anchor to keep them afloat. Either way, it would be hairy.

Originally, the problems had started when the bilge pump quit while they were struggling to retrieve their longline. They had 9000 feet of it set off Sharatin Bay, a little over two miles from shore. The Sand Flea was already riding low, with the two and a half tons of halibut and crushed ice in the hold, and the seawater building up only brought the scuppers closer to sea-level. The deck was almost constantly awash, the hydraulic boom was crashing back and forth and some of the halibut they had managed to pull aboard got chucked back over and lost. Joe locked a leg around the metal frame of the big longline reel mounted on the stern to keep his balance while trying to bleed and gut the fish that were left. They winched in half the longline before the engine quit the first time, and Gary had to cut them free of the line with a gutting knife to keep from being swamped.

The weather was too bad to be pulling the longline set anyway. It would have been better to let the set soak all night. Sure there would be losses. Sharks would tear into the catch, the larger halibut would eventually twist free of the large circle hooks, others would die and get number-twoed, bringing a lower price, but it would have been safer than do what they had done.

Gary had over thirty years experience commercial fishing off Kodiak. He knew better. He stayed alive because of his respect for the weather and the ocean. It was Joe who finally prodded his skipper into action. The older man’s wisdom caved under the younger man’s enthusiasm.

It was not that Joe had a lack of respect for the ocean or how dangerous and unpredictable it could be, or that he was motivated by the thought of a smaller paycheck. It was that he had respect for the fish, too, strung up and dying slowly and grotesquely out there while he sat idle, holed up in the shelter of Anton Larson Bay. It was tough enough for him to be a part of the dead-fish industry in the first place. He was a river junky and a fly fisherman. But he hadn’t a lot of options. He came alone to the island three years before with barely enough money left for a security deposit on an efficiency apartment. As he always had, he took what work he could.

Things didn’t seem too bad after the first engine failure. The wind was taking them toward Port Lions, about four miles across Kizhuyak Bay, and Gary was sure they could radio another boat once they got close. He knew a man, a half Russian, half native Alutiiq, who lived there and would shack them up and help with the boat. But Gary got the old diesel going again and they decided to make the run back to Anton Larson Bay, the same sheltered spot they had spent the last two nights gutting and icing down their day’s catch. There was a gravel road connecting the bay to civilization, so if the engine quit once they were there they could tie up and one of them would hitch a ride. Runnamuck Charters ran a boat out of the area, so there was a decent chance of fishermen being around.

They didn’t make it, though. The engine quit again and this time the wind wasn’t blowing them toward anything pleasant. Gary suggested Joe put on his survival suit. Joe thought that was premature and felt silly taking off his rubber boots and slickers and squeezing into the awkward suit. He did it anyway, but didn’t pull the tight hood over his head. He didn’t think he could without help even if he wanted to. The mitten-like hands made everything he did clumsy.

Gary told him to stay up on the flying bridge to keep watch and give a yell when they got close to land. Then Gary lowered the anchor and went below to coax life back into his boat for the second time.

Three miles later Joe realized it was going to be either him or the anchor keeping them from splintering into the rocky shoreline. He could see they were headed toward Whale Passage and it would only be a matter of time before they collided with Whale Island or one of the northern appendages of Kodiak Island.

Joe yelled down to Gary, who stuck his head out of the cabin for a moment, surveyed the impending situation and then disappeared below again. They were getting dangerously close to the southern edge of Whale Island. Joe could hear Gary on the radio. The Sand Flea and her crew were in distress. They were still almost a hundred feet from shore when the anchor caught on the bottom. Joe felt a wave of relief that lasted only seconds. The hull slammed into rock with a dull thump that sent Joe hard to his knees. The next swell broke them free with a jerk that sent him over the wheel, tumbling off the bow and into the ocean.

The shock of the water was intense even with the survival suit on. Joe’s scalp tightened instantly and his breath was taken away by the cold. When he surfaced he could see the Sand Flea on her side, her wooden hull half out of the water and torn to pieces. And he saw Gary crawl onto the pitching deck with his own survival suit in his hands. He never got it on.

The boat went down quickly. So did Gary. For quite some time afterward Joe felt objects bump against his legs in the waves. Thinking it might be his skipper, he reached for them, but they always turned out to be chunks of crushed ice from the gutted hold, or large, stiff halibut carcasses. It wasn’t long, though, before Joe was blown by the wind and carried by the currents away from the wreckage site. He bobbed and froze for hours, and helplessly watched the big orange-and-white C-130 circle back along the coast for the last time and leave.


                                                                        * * *


It had been the search for a home river that brought Joe to Alaska. A good home river, according to him, was what gauged the amount of happiness one could expect from life. It was narrowness in vision purposely self-inflicted to maximize what his eyes could catch and his mind could cherish. Joe wanted to enjoy his life, and he hadn’t for most of his twenty-nine years. He survived by ignoring the fast-paced, money-based ideology that surrounded him for the first twenty-six and focused instead on something maybe even less tangible: moving water.

The muddy, carp- gar- and sucker-strewn rivers Joe embraced back in Illinois were less than what he knew was out there. He had read about the Western trout rivers, dreamed and fantasized about them, but in return always felt guilty, as though he were coveting someone else’s lover. It took him eight years of piddling, meaningless jobs and less-than-adequate rivers, after graduating next to last in his highschool class, to realize he would never reach any great heights as either a man or a river-lover without a real river. How could a poet sing magic with ink without any real emotion as fuel? How could an artist spill worlds onto a blank canvas without real love for the world on which the easel stood? How could Joe ever submerge himself in life and let himself be swept away without ever giving himself over entirely to an entity capable of taking him for all he had to give? How could a river-lover live without a real river?

He couldn’t. That’s why he quit stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, changed the oil in his pickup and drove to Alaska. Originally he was headed for Montana, but he got turned around at night in North Dakota after getting gas, wound up in line for Canadian Customs, went with the flow and after the hassle getting out of the U.S. decided to just keep driving north. The urge to ferry to Kodiak came days later, after the busy Anchorage intersections reminded him of those in Springfield and Chicago that always scared the hell out of him.

Joe was scared, too, when he first realized he was going to die out there in the water, within sight of land. But he came to grips with it. He was so tired and numb and the pain in his eyes made him crave sleep more than ever. And he knew with sleep came death. He consoled himself with what was left of his humor and of the still-recent memories of the virtual Eden of rivers he’d stumbled onto in the last three years. They had made him confident and happy for the first time in his life. He loved them all for it, and gave himself over to them fully. Now, he thought, What irony . . . . He was being returned to the same vast mother of waters that had been swallowing his rivers whole for eternity. He didn’t mind so much when he finally accepted he was living the last hour or less of his life in the way he was probably meant to. It all seemed to fit in his mind comfortably.

Joe had fallen in love with the Buskin River first. He camped in a tent alongside it during his first two weeks on the island. It took him that long to track down a permanent place to sleep because the river was such a distraction. The sockeye salmon were just moving in from the ocean and Joe caught his first one – a bright six-pound female – at the end of his first evening before he even pitched his tent. He cast a small olive and white streamer he’d tied himself. It was a fly he liked to use for smallmouth bass and it was still tied to the end of his leader when he dug his rod out from behind the bench seat of his pickup. Joe didn’t know what fly to use, he didn’t even know what kind of fish were swimming in this new river, so he went with what he had on. And he was brought almost to tears after hooking and landing his first one. It ran farther, fought harder and jumped higher than anything Joe had ever had on the end of a line. Kneeling beside the beached fish he felt as though the river had acknowledged him, the stranger standing on her bank, and greeted him. He felt welcomed, and grateful.

Joe killed and gutted his gift of salmon, then wrapped it in aluminum foil and buried it in a bed of hot coals raked from his campfire. He left it there until it smelled done. Then he ate until he could barely roll over. Later that night he picked the leftover salmon flesh off the bones, mixed it into the almost empty jar of mayonnaise he had with him for the entire ten-day drive and fourteen-hour ferry ride. It made enough sandwich spread to last for days, and he ate nothing else.

Joe eventually did get away from the intoxicating enchantment of the Buskin long enough to find a place to live that was more comfortable than his tent – a small, second-floor apartment in town. It was the cheapest place he could find advertized in the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

The first year Joe worked in one of the many canneries on the island. He was made foreman in his first week and had over a dozen young Filipinos in his charge, mostly boys in their late teens who didn’t speak much English. Joe had never been anyone’s boss before and he didn’t like it. He had always found maintaining responsibility for himself challenging enough. It was this that made him leave the cannery after the first year, not the odd hours, low pay or minority status.

Working at the cannery did give Joe a convenient way to meet most of the skippers on the island. He would always make sure to be out on the dock when the boats were there to deliver fish or get ice before their trip out. It was because of this that Gary knew Joe and hired him when he asked. Gary hired on two other men about Joe’s age during the salmon openers, but at the end of the season Joe was the only one kept on for the halibut fishing. That was where the better money was, and Joe was honored.

Joe had road access to two other rivers just as wonderful as the Buskin and countless smaller creeks, but there was just too much good fishing less than twenty minutes from his apartment. He had Lake Ambercrombie on the north edge of town full of chunky rainbow trout, and at the head of the Buskin River was Buskin Lake, both of which seemed to get a make-over every month-and-a-half when a different salmon species moved in: sockeyes, pinks, cohos, and feisty Dolly Varden with light pink spots to tantalize between salmon runs.

But Joe, with all his newly discovered love, died early, before he could even live long enough to deny his thirtieth birthday. His body was found a mile off the coast of Whale Island by an old man, a half Russian, half native Alutiiq.

The old man threaded a line under Joe’s armpits, tied a loose bowline and towed Joe behind his skiff to Port Lions. On the way neither men’s expressions changed. The old man wore a reserved frown, a sad look, but one also that suggested this wasn’t the first dead man he’d towed home. Joe, though, appeared more cheerful. His face pointed skyward and was framed by moving water, a wake that wrapped gently around his head, and it held the same blue-lipped half-smile he’d donned in the last moments of his life. It was a smile brought on by the memory of three beautiful years of loving, and being nurtured by, the most real rivers he had ever known.

His last thoughts were of perfectly clear, running water, and of bright, big-bodied salmon. And he had few, if no, regrets.

The Reservoir

(I dug out this story from deep within my hard drive the other day. I had written it back when I lived in rural Ohio and was regularly bass fishing with one of my best friends from high school. I have paired the story with some recent photos from Russell Miller…from a very similar fishing trip a decade later.)

The reservoir is near perfect. It’s close to home, well hidden and few people know exactly where it is. It’s not tiny, but easily small enough to fish entirely in an afternoon by two driven individuals with fly rods and float tubes.

There are lots of fish. Most of them aren’t big, but there’s plenty of healthy one-to-three-pound largemouth bass. The bass there have this spunky, naive cockiness that makes you laugh and want to refer to them as friends, not combatants. It’s something about the way they strike a large fly and then jump over and over again—like a roped mustang that knows he’ll never be ridden. Something about the unbeaten, feisty look they give you when you’re holding them firmly by the bottom lip. Then the indignant splash in the face with the caudal fin when they’re released. And the water is always clear, so their black lateral markings are always dark, distinct and beautiful.

But, like most things perfect, pure or beautiful and within reach of man, the reservoir is slated for a few rounds of raping and defacing. I’m sure there will always be fish there, so it won’t be utter ruin, but their wonderful innocence will fade when the bulldozers come.

The township has owned the reservoir and the land around it for long enough to round up and say forever. But it has now been sold. The rumors, from those with both knowledge of the reservoir and of township politics, are that three local men went in on the venture together. Some are saying the three plan to divvy it up into a half-dozen smaller lots and make a killing in real estate.

With that in mind, Jason and I rationalized that trespassing would be, by comparison, almost innocent. And, after further thought, we figured sneaking back past the No Trespassing signs was our duty. We couldn’t justify not doing it – to ourselves, anyway. We had to do our part to preserve the reservoir, even if it was just saving the once fantastic fishing in our memory.

* * *

I had set the alarm clock to go off before light, but, although there is plenty of motivation to get up at the crack of dawn, it is Saturday morning, so it just doesn’t happen. The sun is already up by the time I load my rod, fishing vest and float tube into the truck and leave the apartment.

Two young whitetail deer bound across the road in front of me and stop in someone’s front lawn to look back at me. I slow down and the deer and I stare at each other as I glide by. Their red spring coats make them stand out vividly against the lush new greens around them. I notice one of them has velvet knobs on its head, the beginnings of his first set of antlers. They flip their tails as I pass and I watch in the rear view mirror and see them stripping leaves from a young ornamental tree. The homeowners are still in bed. The curtains are drawn.

Seeing the deer renews my enthusiasm to fish the reservoir. They make me feel fleet and a bit brazen…like a righteous outlaw. Like a whitetail on a front lawn. I drive on, only faster because I know Jason has probably been ready to go for better than an hour. I regret sleeping in.

* * *

Melissa comes to the door in pajamas when I knock.

“Jason up?” I ask.

“Come on in,” she says, still partially asleep. “He never came to bed last night. He was up messing with his flies.”

I see Jason sprawled out on the couch in shorts

and no shirt and his mouth is open and his eyes are closed. A stool is pulled up with a fly vise attached to it. Bags of hooks and feathers are everywhere. Some deer hair dragonflies are embedded in an arm of the couch.

Melissa leans over and shakes him awake.

“Is Jay here yet?” Jason mumbles.

“Yes, he’s standing right here,” she says.

He stands up quickly, staggers, and then starts picking out assorted fishing gear from the mess he has made on the living room floor.

“How long ya been here?” he asks.

“Just walked in. Just woke up myself.” I rub my eyes and yawn. “We can do this later in the day if you want.”

“Hell no,” he says.

We discuss strategy once Jason has all his gear in my truck. Not fishing strategy, evasion strategy. The plan we cook goes something like this: drive out to Jason’s parents’ farm and drop him off so he can get his 4-wheeler. From there I’ll drive the mile or two out to the reservoir and stash our float tubes and flippers. There’s a house right at the entrance of the gravel lane going back to the reservoir. The lady who lives there is the self-appointed guardian. She’ll call the sheriff if anything seems fishy… Once I have the tubes dropped off, I’ll quick drive back out past the house and meet Jason back at the farm. We’ll wait there for a while, until we feel everything has settled down. The lady might see my truck come and go and think it doesn’t warrant a call for the law. If she calls anyway, there won’t be anything to find. The coast will be clear. That’s when we make our move. Jason and I will come in the back way, along edges of fields and down deer trails on the 4-wheeler – brandishing fly rods. If we need to make a getaway, we’ll hide the float tubes again and take off on the 4-wheeler. We’re untouchable. Sneaky like a coon on a chicken farm.

* * *

“No sign of anybody back there, huh?” Jason asks.

“Nope.” I fiddle with a piece of straw from the floor of the barn. “No people. No tracks. I bet it ain’t been fished all summer.”

The first part of the plan worked. I got the tubes and flippers stashed behind a brush pile with leaves and branches draped over top of them. Now there’s nothing to do but wait. So far, so good.

Jason looks out the open barn door and flicks a wadded up piece of straw in the general direction of his dads’ cows. “How was the water?” he asks.

“Good. Really clear.”

We stand and look out the barn door some more.

“My dad can’t plant anything straight,” Jason says.

I follow his gaze out past the cattle, out

to the wheat field. The crop is thick and vibrant. It ripples slightly with the light morning breeze, like nervous water on the surface of a calm pond.

“Looks like a drunk man planted it. It’s bad. Look at it!” He flicks another piece of straw out the barn door. “With wheat you can really tell, too. You can still see it’s crooked. You can see where the planter went. It looks like he just let go of the wheel…looked back and let the tractor go wherever. Oh, man. Big gaps. He missed three…four foot wide gaps.”

I nod my head and wonder how the fishing will be.

“Looks like dog shit,” Jason says.

“whatta ya think?” I glance at Jason. He’s still peering out at the wheat field. “Think it’s safe to go back yet?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s your call.”

* * *

We drive in slow, in first gear. The four-wheeler is still too loud, so we stop occasionally in the tall, wet grasses and listen for voices or engine noises. Once we’re close enough and can see

reflection from the water through the trees I dismount the four-wheeler and recon up ahead. I used to do this sort of thing back when I was in the service. It was the fun part of the Army…the part I was good at. A young sheriff’s deputy doesn’t stand a chance at getting the jump on me today.

I approach the reservoir from one of the wooded sides, so I can’t get a great view of the entire bank. But I’m concealed by a grove of poplar, sumac and maple, with a good view of the other side—the side where our gear is stashed and where the gravel lane connects us and the reservoir to the road, civilization and the law. There is nobody here. Everything is just as serene as it was an hour or so ago. There is very little evidence of people back here…even old sign. No trash, no tracks, no fire pits. But at the far corner, near the one good stand of cattails, is an old, dilapidated outbuilding. It’s a prefabricated steel hut and the door is left open. On its’ floor lies a dirty yellow life preserver covered with bits and pieces fallen from the rotted shelving and drop ceiling. At the edge of the water near this building is a concrete drain. From a distance it looks like the remains of an old dock. There is a single metal picket post sticking out of the water at an angle with a sunken fiberglass dinghy lashed to it. The water is so clear that if viewed from above, you might not realize the boat is on the bottom.

I turn to motion the All Clear to Jason, but see he is already off the four-wheeler and headed toward me with our fly rods. The four-wheeler is parked for a fast departure—facing the way we came. I give a thumbs up. And a grin. The reservoir is ours.

“Where’d you leave our shit?”

I nod in the direction of the other side.

* * *

Putting flippers on your feet while on dry land, then waddling over to an inflated doughnut of a float tube, climbing in, strapping yourself down and then trying to get into the water has got to be one of the most uncoordinated, clumsy things I’ve ever attempted. Barring a certain drunken late-night episode on a trampoline that I’m still struggling to erase from my memory. And I’m sure she is too.

I can’t help but feel silly, even though the only person who can see me is a good friend who is struggling into the same sort of contraption. But everything changes once we’re free floating and in water deep enough not to touch bottom and risk getting feet and flippers lost in the mud. Now I feel as graceful and commanding as a big goose on a duck pond. I can move in any direction with the slightest kick, I can spin all the way around without falling down. And my face is close enough to the surface of the water to give my mind the illusion of swimming.

Jason kicks out next to me and then we drift slowly apart—intent on getting rigged to fish. We’ll be tying on the same thing: a Krystowski Minnow. We tie them in various sizes and colors, but the one I fish the most is about two or three inches of black, chartreuse and white Icelandic sheep hair from the Erie Outfitters fly shop. I tie them on size 1 stinger hooks with small, painted lead eyes—tied so the hook bend rides up and makes it less prone to snagging weeds. I tie all the sheep hair in right behind the lead eyes and use the butt ends of the black hair (which I put on last) to wrap a few times around the eyes to give it sort of a bulky head. The sheep hair undulates through the water and makes it look alive. The white eyes with round black pupils make it look scared shitless…which makes bass a bit nuts.

I hook my first fish before I’m ready. I’m stripping line off the reel and kicking out away from the bank. The bass takes my fly, but there’s too much slack line out on the water for me to set the hook, so I promptly lose him. I look over to see if Jason has seen what has just happened. He has.

“I wasn’t ready yet.”

He nods. Then his fly line jerks and he raises his rod tip, setting the hook firmly. “Whoa!” he says.

I quick get my line under control and make a short cast back to the edge where we entered the water. Jason’s bass jumps twice, barely reentering the water before coming back up. I hear him laugh. I strip my own line back toward me as fast as I can, making the Krystowski Minnow dart through the clear reservoir like a panicked bluegill. And a bass strikes it hard enough to make a swirl on the surface of the water and yank line out of my hand. “Whoa! Shit!” I say and set the hook proper into this one.

The bass keep hitting at a feverish pitch. Hitting hard, too, and jumping. We have one on every third or fourth cast. Most times we’re fighting fish at the same time. We quick release them and position ourselves for another cast. I’m so cranked up I’m close to hyperventilating, but neither one of us dares slow down. We know this action can’t last. It’s crazy.

But it never lets up. After two hours we have each caught and released over three dozen largemouth bass, most over twelve inches and some around sixteen inches. We’re working our way around the edge of the reservoir, leapfrogging each other down the bank in our float tubes. The action doesn’t slow down, but we do. Our arms are tired from casting and then frantically stripping in line. I decide to slow down my retrieve, but then get even lazier and just leave my line out and troll. I’m giving my legs a workout, but resting my arms. My fly sinks deeper because I’m kicking along slower than I was retrieving, but there’s obviously plenty of bass down deep as well. I’m still getting hook ups.

I see Jason has taken a different approach. It looks like he has gone with something top water. That way he can cast and rest. I cruise past him to see what sort of fly he’s using. I get close enough to see for myself, without asking. It’s a grasshopper pattern with a clipped deer hair head. A good-sized bass swirls and takes the fly as I’m watching. Jason lifts his rod fast and snaps his four-pound tippet.

“Damn,” he says. “Got too excited!”

By this time we have both caught enough fish. Losing one, even if it is a good one, is hardly a disappointment.

Then we hear gravel crunching. Gravel under tires. We freeze. Jason lets a back cast fall to the water behind him and I stop kicking with my flippers. Deer in headlights.

A black SUV rounds the final bend in the gravel lane and comes to a halt at the edge of the reservoir. We can’t see inside, but the tinted drivers-side window glares at us. Jason and I stare back. We’re prepared for this…but we do nothing. Suddenly the vehicle is put in reverse and turned around and then it is gone in a cloud of gravel dust.

“That was her,” Jason says.

My arms are numb and my heart is racing.

“Yup,” I say. Then I finish my retrieve. And a bass hits. I hold my rod high and the fish leaps, spraying water back at me. I cackle loudly. Jason hoots. No sense in being sneaky now. We’ve been compromised. The law is in route, no doubt.

I let the bass go and look over at Jason. “So…whatta we do?”

“Well,” he says as he winds in his fly line. “I hate to leave.” He looks at me and arches his eyebrows to express the importance of what he is about to say. “But we sorta have to!”

* * *

We kick to shore and climb out of our float tubes with a strange sense of calm urgency. We know we don’t have much time, but we know we have enough. I drag all of our bulky gear back behind the brush pile were I had hidden it all before and cover it with dead leaves and branches. By now Jason has located the four-wheeler and gotten it started. I take only my fly rod and fishing vest with me.

I climb onto the back of the four-wheeler with Jason and we beat feet, move out, di di mau…vacate the area at a high rate of speed.

Somewhere near the middle of a large, overgrown field we cut the engine and hunker down. The grasses and weeds are tall enough to completely conceal the four-wheeler, and once we are down beside it we have all but vanished without an easily noticeable trace.

“Damn. Was that some hot fishin’ or what?” I say as more of a testament than a question.

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Too bad ya can’t write about it.”