We were visiting my grandparents in their little sorry town in southern New Hampshire, a town that knew much more of poverty than an occasional flirt with prosperity could change. Those folks remaining there were too stubborn, lazy or timid to move. Thus they were stuck in time, living a life that was at least a century too old, half-way between subsistence and the modern world. My dad was never one of them. He never really liked fishing or hunting very much. In fact, to my knowledge he’s never once hunted in his life. His father, a schoolteacher, was the same way. They were unique.

Not me. Even at the time of this memory when I was five or six, I was the opposite, a city boy drawn to the outdoors. Here, in the country, I had one thing on my mind. I wanted to go fishing. And my dad obliged. We borrowed a pole from my uncle, dug worms from my grandmother’s garden and at dusk, drove to a nearby mill pond to fish at the sluiceway dam. I remember catching bluegill and yellow perch. My dad watched but never joined in. He was satisfied watching me, uninterested in fishing himself, an indifference that I could never understand.

My dad was always hard-working and generous, a natural leader. Every time someone asked for his help, he said yes. He would quickly advance to lead whatever the endeavor: deacon, Boy Scout Regional Counsel President, City Recreation Board President, City Little League Board President and on and on. These things swallowed his free time and energy in great gulps, yet another trait he inherited from his father who suffered a similar tendency. So I’ll never forget the day my father did something completely uncharacteristic; he bought an ancient aluminum lake boat with an equally ancient Johnson motor, with trailer. He paid a couple hundred bucks for it and pulled it home behind his green Chevelle.

This ugly little boat was his chance to reclaim himself from his selflessness.

I should also mention one pertinent fact; he did not completely think this purchase through. My dad was never an impulsive man and had little experience with it. Soon it became clear that this little boat was probably both too unreliable and too small for the adventures we would ask of it. That did not stop my dad, brother and me from taking it out into the Atlantic. We were undaunted. When others questioned us we pointed out that the clammers out of Essex and Ipswich navigated similar waters with aluminum boats as insubstantial as ours. (Actually, their boats and motors were both better and newer.)

My dad needed a reason to take out this little boat, other than to challenge the Atlantic and have adventures, so that’s where I came in. I had advanced as a fisherman, spent every spare dollar I had on tackle and gear. So we all became fishermen, my dad, brother and me, and we had our little boat. We explored to coastline from Boston to Gloucester, stopping from time to time to land a few flounder, cod, haddock or mackerel. In time it became clear that only the three of us, my dad, brother and I, had sufficient confidence in our little boat. If we were to include others (our sister, mother, girlfriends) in our adventures, my dad would have to move up to a more substantial vessel. This led to an evolution of sorts. Boats came and went over the years, each one bigger and faster than the last until my father realized that no boat was big enough to gain on my mother’s advancing age and timidity. He finally gave up on including her in his midlife love of the sea and settled on an 18 foot Aquasport with a 90 Merc, a boat he could easily launch and handle by himself. Like that first little aluminum lake boat, he would take that Aquasport where others would never dare. And never once did he do so with any trepidation.

My dad kept it, took it out by himself now and then, but with my brother and I drifting away, married off and consumed by our own families and ambitions, he’d lost his crew. I moved to Florida to chase a job; my brother was transferred to Atlanta. My mother had a stroke and recovered but it left her exponentially more timid, so my dad sold his boat, his days as captain of his own fishing boat, over.

But that is not the end of this story; it has a happy ending. My wife and I recently visited my dad, now 82 and living in the Villages in north central Florida. The Villages are a strange, insular community north of Orlando, part retirement enclave, part year-round summer camp, part golf haven, part every hour is happy hour party town and part high school with all the clubs and nothing but easy arts classes; it is a place where people go to wrest as much life out of their late years as they can. It’s great for my dad. He and his girlfriend live in a ubiquitous, modest, well-appointed, hip-roofed house among hundreds of modest, well appointed, hip-roofed houses. People in the Villages rarely venture outside their enclave. Inside the Villages they gauge themselves against other active folks of like age, relatively full of life and vigor, but once they pass the invisible barrier separating their enclave from the rest of the world, they are sorely reminded that the sun is surely setting on their lives.

So when my dad asked me what I wanted to do when we arrived at the Villages, he was sure that it would be something offered by the community, a concert perhaps, a play, a round of golf, but that’s not what I told him. I said I wanted to go fishing. How could any man who calls himself a fisherman visit Florida and not wet a line seeking the local strain largemouth bass? He said OK but mistook my response for a desire for an ocean charter. Luckily he confided in my brother who set him straight. It was largemouth I wanted and that seemed far less daunting than a deep sea fishing charter.

He called a guy who knew a guy and we were set. We were to meet our guide at five o’clock AM some fifty miles inland at a remote crossroad, a Circle K, and he would take us down the Indian River. We met our guide, a lean, middle-aged, native northern Floridian, a deep southern bayou man. He was pulling an ancient bass boat with an ancient motor behind a Ford F250 of equal vintage. We followed him down several dark roads to an obscure and narrow boat ramp. He launched the boat by himself in the dark like it was second nature and soon we were winding our way down a wide channel, a river, among towering cypress dressed in Spanish moss; the sun rose behind them. We passed innumerable water fowl, several alligators and saw indeterminable raptors circling in the sky. This was remote country, like most of Florida, flat, wet, and sulking slowly toward the gulf.

After winding for a half hour or so, stopping only to maneuver around known but unseen trees submerged in the river, we came upon a great bend and behind it a great slough, miles across and stretching nearly as far as the horizon. It was filled with a kind of water lily that grows in great rafts on the surface of the water. We stopped. Hooks were baited with shiners and we were told to cast near the rafts of weed. The shiners would swim beneath the lilies to hide only to be ambushed by hungry largemouth bass.

They were. There were also yellow catfish and arowana. I caught several bass, my dad, a couple.

He had a difficult time, at 82, setting the hook, but he did catch the catfish and the arowana. In any case, he took great pleasure in my catches, just as he did on that long ago day at the sluiceway dam. We fished until we were out of bait. Fishing, our guide told us, was slow this time of year, inhibited by tannins released into the water by the cypress trees, staining the water a reddish brown color and reducing water oxygen levels. We didn’t care. We had a great time. Soon we were winding our way back to the boat ramp and navigating the narrow country roads to the Villages. I drove of course. At 82, my dad drives only during daylight and never when a younger driver is available.

On the way home dad insisted that we stop at a Shake’n Steak so he could get a burger and shake, an indulgence his girlfriend would never allow without complaint. I obliged. When I’m 82, I’m taking up cigars again.

Now I’m back in Arizona where the fishing is terrible and I have no boat. The nearest barely navigable lake is hours away. On weekends, its level rises a few feet for all the watercraft launched there. And like my father and grandfather before me, I allow nearly all my time and energy to be taken in great gulps by work and volunteer activities.

I need to move somewhere near water. Then I need to start looking for a boat.