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Dan’s anecdote was the most he had said to anyone at work since the accident. I asked, “You fished since then, Dan?”
    “Not for years,” he replied. “Not since before the twins were born.”
    Frank looked down at his desk. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, “Want to come with me?”
    “Fishing,” Dan said.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “When?”
    “How about this weekend? Say, Saturday morning? Unless you have plans, that is.”
    He scowled, and I realized Dan wasn’t sure if I was mocking him. He said, “I don’t know.”
    All at once, it was the most important thing in the world for Dan to come fishing with me. I can’t say exactly why that should have been. Maybe I wanted to prove my sincerity to him. Maybe I thought that fishing would do for him what it’d done for me; although, as I’ve said, I had no evidence to suggest that Dan’s life had collapsed the way mine had. Or maybe my motive was something less well-defined, something as simple as wanting to have another person to pass a few words with while I fished. I don’t know. Until that moment, I’d always done well enough fishing on my own. Whatever the reason, I said, “Why don’t you come along? I’ve got an extra rod if you need it, and more’n’enough tackle for the two of us. I was just planning on heading out to the Svartkil, so it won’t be that far if you don’t like it and want to leave. I go pretty early—this weather, I like to be set up and have my line in the water by sunrise—but you’re welcome to come whenever you can make it there. What do you say?”
    Dan’s scowl wavered, then dissipated. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”
    And that was how Dan Drescher and I started fishing together. I told him where the spot on Springvale was, and he was there waiting for me when I drove up in the pre-dawn dark. He’d brought his own rod and tacklebox, and from the sheen and smell of both of them, I knew they’d entered his possession in the last day or so. That was okay. It reminded me of myself, those many years ago. He’d brought a hat, too, a kind of straw cowboy affair that I later learned he’d purchased on a vacation in Arizona with his wife. We chose and attached our lures, cast, and as the sun burst through the trees across from us, were sitting waiting to see who might be interested in the early breakfast we were serving.
    That first morning—that first day, actually, since Dan stayed there with me until the sun had moved from our fronts to our backs and then left for the night—we didn’t say much to one another. Nor was there a whole lot of conversation the next day, when (somewhat to my surprise, since he hadn’t mentioned it the previous day, just thanked me as he was leaving) I pulled my car onto the side of the road and my headlights picked out Dan sitting on a tree stump, considering the contents of his tacklebox. He offered no explanation, nodding at me as I walked over and saying, “Morning. Weather report says there might be rain today.”
    “You can still catch ’em in the rain,” I said.
    He grunted, and that was pretty much that for the remainder of the day. The following weekend, we fished the Svartkil again and didn’t do too badly for ourselves. On Sunday night, as we were packing our gear, I said, “I’m thinking of heading up the Esopus next Saturday. Not too far: about forty minutes’ drive. You interested?”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Good,” I said, and meant it.
    So we fished the Esopus the following weekend, and Frenchman’s Creek the weekend after that, and then I took him up to the Catskills, to the Beaverkill, up by Mount Tremper. Sunday night, on our way home, we stopped at Winchell’s, a burger place right on 28, just the other side of Woodstock. This was where I learned that Dan’s family hailed from Phoenicia, a town in the thick of the mountains, and that he knew the area and its history fairly well. He’d never fished it, though. In fact, he said