IN THE DUSTY pile of abandoned hobbies in my garage lay a fly rod and an old canvas vest with boxes of rust-stained flies in the pockets. The vest was a gift from my sister-in-law when I was a teenager and wanted to be a flyfishing novelist. Like many other dreams and hobbies, this one got diluted down to nothing but fragments of imagination. As I built a family and a career, fly-fishing became discarded and abandoned.
When the world shut down for people like me, I took to the water. It was summer 2020. There was no