I was about nine years old, floating down a river in New Hampshire in an old, beat-up rowboat. Aimlessly chucking a Mepp’s Black Fury behind the boat, I daydreamed as I watched the mud swallows dart in and out of their holes in the high river bank. Nearing the take-out, I cast one more time and began reeling like a madman because I couldn’t wait to head in. But as I lifted the flashing black-and-gold spinner out of the water for the last time, the little trout appeared behind it—materializing, it seemed, out of thin air. After a valiant leap for a lure that was half its size, the fish disappeared the second it hit the water.

I sat there mesmerized, not sure if what I’d seen was real. I felt as if I’d come in contact with something remarkable, something that contrasted sharply with the materiality of my childhood world. When I try to trace my lifelong love of trout and the rivers they inhabit, I always end up back at that first, brief encounter with a wild brook trout.