NOW I LAY ME
I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; sometimes on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories
In my sleeping bag on the east slope of the Andes, a few yards from what might be the best brook trout river in the world, I was staring up at the stars and feeling strange. Why, I could not say. The weather was perfect, there were no mosquitoes, and every so often a cool breeze swept in off the mountains to stoke the dwindling campfire—a scene straight out of an angler’s lullaby. From my campmates came the gentle seesaw murmur of easy sleep, but not from me. I just squirmed there in my sleeping bag on my crush of ferns, heart racing and brain glowing, watching the last embers curl up into the stars.
I was at this time in my early 30s and a rash of years when my life was fishing and my fishing was travel. My packs and bags rarely left the staging area of my bedroom floor; the only thing that changed was what went into them: wet-wading boots and malaria pills for India. A box of foam dragonflies for Chile. Black fly prophylactics for Labrador. A canoe paddle and fillet knife for Manitoba. Always a Moleskine notebook, always a Fisher space pen, always a Pelican case full of camera gear. In this way I traded words for water, fishing alongside people who made more in a week than I did in a year. At least once a trip, one of the elder gentlemen would pull me aside and ask—mistaking access for affluence—how I had managed to get the best
