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It is April in Alabama, 1957. The dogwoods are vivid and suggestive on the hillsides surrounding the lake, and the bass and bluegills are on the beds. Fifteen years old and more wise-ass by far than I have any need to be, I am in the bow of an aluminum johnboat. My father sits in the stern, running the electric motor. He is fifty-one, in his prime. He is happy and open this afternoon as he always is when he is fishing, particularly on this lake. The lake, which my mother has named Tadpole, is less than an hour from our home in Birmingham. My father and a couple of other men have owned it for two years. It is his haven from his job and other demons, and it is our haven from the worst of each other.

My father is working the shoreline with a yellow popping bug, covering every good lie with his jerky but efficient fly-casting, catching (so far; we have just gotten to the lake, and dusk, the best time for bass, is a couple of hours away) lots of bluegills the size of your hand. He whoops every time he hooks a fish, and cackles as he plays the bluegills' tight, furious circlings. This annoys me. The whooping and cackling seem out of proportion to the hooking and catching of such small, common fish. I slouch and dream in the bow, as is usually my wont for the first half hour or so of our trips out here. I think of the River Dee in Scotland, about which I have recently read, and the salmon that live in it, and I scroll the surface of the water with the tip of my Orvis Superfine fly rod. The honey-colored cane rod was my father's Christmas gift to me a few months before, and it annoys him that I am using it now so carelessly, to so little end, but he won't say anything about it--nothere.

He does say, "You'd better throw your worm in the water, Skip. Fishing's not a spectator sport, buddy." He says this often, and he means life as much as he does fishing, long before that sentiment became a bumper sticker. I work out some line and wonder how a man his age, a man who has caught marlin and other huge fish in places I dream of going to, who I've seen catch bonefish in the Bahamas and brown trout in Montana, could possibly get so worked up over the little bluegills here in Lake Tadpole. Maybe, I think, he's faking it. For me, maybe. But my father never fakes anything, and I know that.

We both cast to a log angling into the water off the bank. "Fish in your half of the boat, Skip," says my father. A bluegill sucks in his popper with the sound they make, like blowing a kiss. My father whoops and cackles, his face glistening with joy. "There's plenty of lake here for both of us."

We always had home water to come back to, to catch bass and bluegills and to get along, but from the git-go, fishing to me meant traveling to fish.

My father loved to travel, as long as he could do it in style and make fishing the major if not the only point. In the manner of the forties and fifties, he and my mother usually traveled without children, but they would take me and my sister along with them once or twice a year and on a two-week vacation out west every summer. Neither my mother nor my sister was interested in fishing. That left me, and I became his fishing partner on these family trips--to Florida and the Bahamas, Wisconsin, Maine, Mexico, the Rocky Mountains--from the time I was old enough to hold a rod.

I believe that the majority of anglers who travel to fish are by nature either pastoralists or nomads. My father was a pastoralist, a pure lodge man, who liked to go someplace and hole up there for the duration of the trip, getting to know a particular piece of water in intimate detail over a period of time while having the same table for dinner every night. I, on the other hand, was a born nomad. I can remember, in my teens, lying awake at night in dude-ranch cabins in Montana, fantasizing about stealing the keys to the rented car parked outside. I would take my waders, a rod, and a pack full of bananas and hot dogs, and I would depart that single valley to which Fate and my father's vacation choice had confined me, and drive north to the next valley over--and then to the next, and the next, fishing each as I went until I ran out of Montana. Then I thought--if Lynne Dye wasn't already writing me passionate entreaties to come home to Alabama and marry her--I might just continue on into Canada, and then into whatever place was north of Canada.

But though I was from the beginning, in my soul and dreams anyway, a fishing nomad, I did acquire early on from my father his pastoralist appreciation for fishing lodges and camps. In fact, while he was unforgivingly discriminating about them, I have rarely met a fishing lodge I didn't like (though certainly I have liked some much better than others). I believe this is because for as far back as my memory goes I have associated fishing lodges with vacations, with my father's big, hearty, entertaining presence, and with unspoken but unbreakable truces between the two of us as long as we were in one: with fun, peace, and good humor, in other words. And to this day I'm happy for a night or two in lodges that serve up nothing much more than that, along with edible food.