When I was ten my father left and so my mother gave me a fishing rod. Not a new rod or even a fly rod, but a green and brown second-hand spincasting rod, the kind with the closed-face reel and thumb-button trigger. Said she got it at a garage sale. I frowned at it and asked for a fly rod instead—a new one. But my mother rolled her tongue around the inside of her clenched lips and said I sounded just like my father. She said he liked new things too, and if I wanted to play with new things I could just walk right out that same fucking door he did. I wanted a new fly rod, but I sure didn’t want to walk out that same fucking door my father did. I didn’t even know which fucking door he’d walked out, the front or back.

Robert Redford never made a movie about spincasting. And if he did, you can bet your tackle box Brad Pitt wouldn’t star in it. Spincasting’s got none of the grace or romance of the fly-fishing cast. Fly-fishermen sneer and say that spincasting’s like drinking port from a coffee mug. Even still, it can be a difficult skill to master—especially at ten. In those first few weeks of learning, I snagged my shirt, my hair, my ear. Occasionally I’d hook people fishing next to me. Once I even tangled my line around my shoes and floundered into the river. Eventually I harmonized the snap of my wrist and the thumb-button release with the forward acceleration of the rod—at least enough to hit water. I figured out that spincasting is all about timing.

Since then I spend most days fishing. Fishing is the only thing worth spending time on, living along the Crowsnest River in a tiny old mining town with no mines where the streets have no sidewalks except for the few old slabs lining Main Street with weeds busting out of the cracks. For four years I clubbed out a lure with that stiff green and brown second-hand spincasting rod, snapping my wrist, casting out, reeling back in. And though I never caught a single fish, I eventually stopped snagging shrubbery, overcasting the river, and balling up my line inside the closed-face reel. Instead I started sailing lures across the river where they’d plop into the water just under the opposite bank, often within a couple feet of my aim. I was ripening into a master caster. At least until I turned fourteen.