An old man with a robot has stalled his spacecraft during rush hour. A line of commuters slows down to offer moral judgment instead of help. I imagine this idiocy has existed for thousands of years.

Henry can’t decide whether he is shivering because he is wet or because he is afraid. The small indenture in the cliffs where Henry is hiding beside the Clearwater River is too shallow to be called a cave, though it is deep enough to keep him out of the night wind. Why doesn’t Henry leave his little nook? After all, highway twelve is only a few dozen yards across the river from him.

The previous evening, everything seemed to be going well for Henry. A gallery in Lewiston had exhibited his paintings, and after the opening, a student from the local university named Tiffany had accompanied him back to his motel room and blown him. This sat very well with Henry because he had not been blown in many years owing to his wife, Audrey’s, five pregnancies, a sudden escalation in her zeal for religion and a proportionate decline in her sexual desire.

Henry felt no guilt from the brief encounter, perhaps because of Tiffany’s cavalier approach to the incident. After swallowing what she termed his vital essences, she struck a Dracula pose and hissed, “Drained, in the twinkling of an eye.” And this morning, instead of quickly and silently creeping to her car, she had swept around the bathroom performing her ablutions and singing Getting to Blow You with many of the same moves and inflections as Deborah Kerr in The King and I. He still heard her whistling when he peeked through the curtains as she fox-trotted to her blue Grand Am.

At breakfast in a local pancake house, several of the art department faculty had congregated at his table, and, while he downed a massive pile of strawberry blintzes, they debated the significance of his work as a tie between the New York and California schools of painting, occasionally looking to him for approval and confirmation.

Later that morning, after he drove to a turnout, donned his waders, rigged up his fly rod and made his way through the golden foliage of willow and cottonwood, he saw a large steelhead break the surface of the Clearwater. Something in that image along with the cool air, blue sky, warm sun and clear water made Henry speak out loud. “It’s all so true, so true,” and then, thinking of his oldest son’s favorite phrase, “So saweeheeeeeeet.”

As Henry tied on a gaudy yet elegant Thunder and Lightening which he had made following the instructions from Fly Fishing magazine, he really didn’t expect to catch anything. This was his first effort at steelheading, and he had heard many times that catching one on a fly was a long and arduous process; thus, when on his second cast toward the spot where the fish had risen, he tied into what must have been the very same fish, he relegated the experience in its entirety to a dream. The dilemmas of his family became a distant hum behind the scream of his reel’s drag as the fish tore into his backing. The departmental bickering of his colleagues back at B.Y.U. drifted away like the leaves around him when the fish breached then came wholloping back to the surface. Only one small fear pierced Henry — that the fish was, indeed, too good to be true and would escape, leaving him with a limp line and a pounding heart, a situation with which Henry was all too familiar.

So to avoid this minor catastrophe, Henry began to walk downstream to shorten the distance between himself and the fish without putting too much of a strain on his tippet. This effort so engaged Henry that he didn’t notice the substantial aluminum craft drifting up behind him, a craft loaded with three large men and two brown Labrador Retrievers. Only when the burly gentleman in the bow said, “Ride ‘im cowboy” did Henry become aware of the small carnival which had coalesced on the periphery of his dream.

Shortly thereafter, the shirtless and hirsute fellow at the oars said “Fuck me runnin’,” drained his Rainier and tossed the can into the current near Henry so that he might secure a better grip and position the craft for his friends to fish the very hole in which Henry was standing.

“Excuse me, but …” said Henry.

“Yer excused,” said the gentleman in the stern, and then he said “Ain’t he” to the dog sitting in front of him. The dog seemed to gather the significance of the situation and set up a high pitched howl, to which the gentleman at the oars responded, “Shut that bitch up,” and then, “You too,” to the other lab who had joined in. “Dogs need more beer,” said the man in the bow, and he poured his beer over the head of the dog beside him so that it calmed down to a whimper as did the dog toward the stern.

“This is the best hole we’ll fish today,” said the man at the oars, “so smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.” Accordingly, the others lobbed contraptions of lead, surgical tubing and salmon eggs into the deepest part of the pool. Immediately, the man in the bow hooked a fish which shot downstream to one side of the run then the other, encircling Henry’s line then swimming upstream so that Henry’s line went limp. When he tightened it up, both he and the other man seemed momentarily hooked into one big fish; then both of their lines went slack.

“You fuck,” screamed Henry. “You fucking fuck.”

“You better put a lid on it, sport,” said the man at the oars.

“I’ll fucking show you a fucking lid,” said Henry charging toward the shore so that he slipped and filled his waders. The cold water only seemed to add another dimension to Henry’s intensity as he sloshed onto a gravel bar and picked up two lime-sized stones.

“Easy there, pretty boy, you’re gonna,” said the man in the bow but he didn’t finish because one of Henry’s stones grazed the side of his head and knocked off his cap that said Lucky Bug .

“Jesus,” said the man in the stern, and he winged a full can of Rainier at Henry but missed so that the can hit the rocks and bounced away spewing circles of foam. Henry started to assess his situation and regain his composure — but not enough to keep him from giving his remaining stone a halfhearted lob toward the boat. Henry didn’t really want the stone to hit anything, much less a dog, but it beaned the beer-drenched lab which consequently slid into the water.

Then everything went quiet until the man rowing said in a calm, deliberate voice, “I think we need to cut him.”

Now, from his little grotto, Henry can barely discern the sounds of glass breaking in the turnout where he parked his Suburu Forester. He has convinced himself that his pursuers will not search for him here where he swam under the cover of darkness after the beams of their flashlights began to probe the muddy depths where he hid in a long jam.

“Shhhhhh, Good boy,” says Henry as he pets the lumpy head of the lab which has just shaken itself dry next to him. “Nice boy.”

I own a small house in Livingston, Montana, where I’m able to fish with friends and family, work on failed novels and unleash dysfunctional lines of Labrador retrievers into local watersheds without anyone having to bother me. Last summer, I entertained a divorced, grade school classmate, ostensibly to fish the giant stonefly hatch, but because of high water, his chronic trolling of Match.com and our shared wanderlust, the trip primarily consisted of driving county to county in a beat-up SUV, stopping for Rainiers and wireless connections and mindlessly throwing egg-sucking leeches into dingy back eddies. Other than an enormous brown trout we observed drafting a bridge piling for hours in the rain, our three-day fishing achievement was unremarkable at best.

The evening before my friend was to board a plane back home, I promised a subdued Livingston pub-crawl, hoping to unearth memorable character studies and a qualified female lead for my hormonal protégé. We ate dinner and listened to a mechanic bemoan Montana’s beleaguered walleye fishery at The Murray, made lifelong enemies at The Mint by repeatedly cueing Van Halen and Billy Squier, and finally settled on The Owl Lounge as a suitable playground for his mid-life crisis. I agreed to an hour-long window; he agreed to avoid charges of sexual harassment.

After securing a tallboy at The Owl, I wandered out to 2nd Street, away from the claustrophobic feed lines and into the star-filled evening. Almost immediately, I was approached by a muscular gentleman, flanked by his friends and their girlfriends, in what appeared an uncomfortable tête-à-tête. The young man gripped a mason jar full of beer in one hand, while intermittently massaging his pectoral muscles with the other. I quickly recycled the past three days’ events, hoping to recall an innocuous offense or misunderstanding, but was completely stumped. I decided to break the tension by flatly asking, “Can I help you?”

“I’m The Razor, if you didn’t know already, and I’ve seen you dragging your boat around town for the past week. It’s time we talk about where you’re fishing.”

“You must have me confused with someone else. We’ve just been here a few days, and I don’t even own a …”

“Dude, I’m serious. I’m asking you a question, and I want an answer, or someone’s gonna get their ass kicked!”

After deciding against the idea of placing my open-handed fist somewhere within The Razor’s headspace, I calmly leaned against his left ear and stated privately, “Be careful what you wish for …”

Nodding his head and rubbing a manicured, mustacheless beard, The Razor took a few seconds to consider the statement, then turned to his anxious fly fishing faction and announced with a wry smile, “Okay, this guy’s totally legit!”

And with that, everyone but The Razor dispersed into The Owl to secure more alcohol, or continue their abbreviated conversations. With the appearance of having negotiated some bizarre gang initiation, I now was able to engage The Razor without fear of physical retribution.

I regaled him with tales of stripers, redfish, tarpon, bonefish and Makos brought to skiffs with gaudy flies; he regaled me with tales of carp, paddlefish, midnight Beaverhead floats and a deadly multi-fly rig he referenced as “The Matador.” When I noted “The Matador” reminded me of an east coast umbrella rig, he replied sternly, “That’s the stupidest comparison I’ve eve heard.”

I made assumptions regarding his employment as a local fishing guide only to be lectured around the alleged capitalism and soullessness earmarking the profession. At one point, I even lay my hand on his bicep to gauge its circumference and was charged with latent homosexuality.

In many ways, interacting with The Razor was like interacting with a person strangled by insanity, which I assumed he was.

When my hormonal protégé finally wandered outside to see whom I was speaking, a palpable silence fell over the conversation. My friend introduced himself to the young man and was met with indifference. Openly annoyed, my friend asked, “Who the hell is this guy?”

I responded, “The Razor.”

After my friend registered a deeply perplexed look, The Razor looked at us both and announced, “The name? It means I refuse to marry, refuse to take a paycheck and refuse to get off the river until I die … do you think that sounds crazy?”

First appeared in The Drake.

Captain says the poons are laid up near the Shark River, eating Cockroaches and Jungle Bunnies if you’re man enough to make a ninety-foot cast without dirtying your laundry. The twenty-mile run involves repeated wrong turns, appearances of his free-ranging testicles and a patchwork of memories around tarpon wads flooding past Homosassa and Elliott Key. Shit, there were so many fish, it would’ve been impossible for one of them not to have eaten your fly. At our intended locale some new young asshole guide runs wide open through the fishing, precipitating thick strings of profanity, followed by awkward silence. We bow our heads until captain doubles his faded yellow skiff through a river of mangroves, herons and raining bait, clutching a chrome wheel and throttle with scalded, skinless hands. When he cuts the engine alongside a second tarpon flat, fish are a goddamn certainty. Above the deck on a poling platform, he angles a long black crook between sea and God, then slowly herds the ancient iron schools like a bowlegged shepherd from Hangnail, Oklahoma. In the distance, we watch an eighty-pound free-jumper throw its machinery across the horizon, until it’s time to work. Tarpon at eleven o’clock, coming to ten. Make the cast! Strip, give it some life, not mechanical, yeah, like that. Okay, that’s good. Let’s see if we can’t jump one of these six-footers. Chrissake! Check your goddamn line! Make sure it’s clear! He’s on it, he’s on it. Eat the fly tarpon …

The depravity of fishing the ponds by Bozeman’s shopping mall pales next to an indignity I forced upon myself on the lower Yellowstone at a community so aptly named Intake, Montana. The travesty commenced one spring in the early Nineties when I beheld a photo in a regional Fish and Wildlife tabloid of a gentleman in a Harley Davidson baseball cap hoisting a gargantuan shark-like fish with a proboscis longer than its head. In the crook of his arm nestled a deep-sea fishing rod and reel with a spark plug and a giant treble hook dangling from the line. Enthralled, I read on.

I discovered that it was a paddlefish and the motorcycle aficionado was using a spark plug and a treble hook because the behemoths only feed by filtering plankton through their gills; thus, to catch one on fishing tackle, one must snag it. As instructed by the article, I proceeded to the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to buy my paddle fish snagging license and tag. In the accompanying instruction pamphlet, I gleaned that a fossil of one of these fish had been excavated from within the ribs of duckbilled dinosaur.

That weekend, I was supposed to meet my friends Ed and Jenny Dorn and Dobro Dick at The Wild Horse Pavilion, a whore house in Miles City, Montana. From there, we were to launch forth into the phantasm of The Miles City Bucking Horse Sale, but with my new deep-sea fishing rig gleaming in the back of my pickup, I only stopped long enough in Miles City to silently mouth, “Nope, they’re not here,” then sped on to the irrigation dam at Intake.

Arriving at such a place, one might at first think that one had come upon a grotesque backwoods religious ritual. For approximately two hundred feet stretched a line of men, women and children dressed in costumes ranging from rompers to leisure suits to bikinis, all holding the requisite deep sea fishing rig, spark plug, and treble hook, awaiting their turn at the head of the line to snag a paddle fish then proceed to the back of the line, passing their rod over the heads of those who would follow them.

Without wasting a second, I secured my place among their ranks and awaited my turn. On the bank not far behind us sat families with blankets and picnic baskets, and between those waiting and casting and those picnicking raced children and dogs. Occasionally I would hear a screech or a whoop as a spark plug beaned a child or a treble hook snagged a dog. The paddlefish were so plentiful, backed up where they could continue no further because of the irrigation dam, it was no time at all before I was at the front of the line snagging my own, then working my way over the heads of fellow anglers to the back.

As I battled the anachronism, I could tell that it was large, but it tuckered quickly, and I dragged it to shore next to an adolescent girl, sunburned in her pink terry cloth short shorts and a tee shirt that said Daddy’s Little Girl. Her daddy, a huge darkly tanned fellow in an AC/DC tee-shirt with the sleeves torn off, was weighing her fish, still hooked to her line. “Twenty-five pounds,” he bellowed.

“Mine’s twenty-five pounds. How big is yours?” said the girl.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Daddy,” said the girl, “Come here and weigh this guy’s fish.”

As I pulled it quivering up on the rocks, the man said, “Hell, it’s just a dink, sixteen pounds at the most. I ain’t even gonna weigh it.”

“Yours is just a dink,” said the girl.

“And look,” said Daddy, “it’s been caught before. See that hole there where somebody took their tag out? I guess they must of upgraded. You’d best keep that there dink ‘cause it ain’t gonna live much longer nohow.”

“I was planning on it,” I said.

“You’d best,” said Daddy, “and you’d best gut it out quick ‘cause they don’t last long in this heat. That there’s the guttin’ shack.” He pointed to a building that was hardly more than a booth in a nearby clump of cottonwoods.

Standing in the gutting shack, nursing an ice-cold Bubble-Up and inspecting my catch where it lay gleaming on a slab by the cleaning sink before me, I began to have reservations. This creature wasn’t grotesque, it was cartoon-like. For want of a better word, it was cute with its beady little eyes, its long flat nose and its blimp-like body. It somehow reminded me of the Hudson my parents owned when I was a toddler. Its ancestors had swum with the dinosaurs and I had dragged it into my world to be labeled a dink and lugged to the gutting shack.

I looked out the window, which was more of a big rectangular hole in the wall with its cover propped open on a stick. Just outside was a large dumpster filled with the heads and guts of paddlefish. An Asiatic fellow was furtively going through the guts, sorting out the strips of caviar and slipping them into a large red cooler beside him. I don’t think such a practice had yet been banned, but, by his discrete behavior, I assumed that it was discouraged.

My heart sank as I gazed upon all of those severed heads with their beady little eyes and comic bills, so I quickly plopped my own contribution on top of the pile, gutted the body, slabbed it into steaks, carved off the strong smelling meat on the periphery of each one, tossed the refined product into my cooler on some ice among my remaining Bubble-Ups and toted it to my pickup. As I loaded it in the back, Daddy’s Little Girl approached me.

“Got your dink in there?”

“What’s left of it,” I said.

“ Djew cut the stink-meat off it?” she said, tugging at her shorts where they had sunk into her crotch.

“Yes I did.” I said.

“Lemme see.” She reached in and started to lift the lid of the cooler.

“Sorry, but I have to go now,” I said, swinging up the tailgate.

“Daddy,” yelled the girl toward a camper across the parking lot. “This guy didn’t cut the stink meat off his dink.”

“He what?” yelled Daddy, hefting his bulk from the back of the camper.

I didn’t hear what else he said because, by the time he was across the parking lot, I was on my way back to Bozeman where, upon viewing the remains of my paddlefish, my wife said, “Where’s the rest of Debbie?”

From Trash Fish.

Fly fishing is filled with times of frustration: Getting rained out on the stream, losing a fly in a low hanging branch, being unable to thread your tippet through the hole of a tiny hook because your hands are too cold. One time I drove an hour from home to fish a river in New York. When I opened the trunk to put on my gear, I discovered I had left my fly fishing rod at home! I had my vest and my net, but no rod. I sat by the car and called myself an idiot repeatedly.

Perhaps the ultimate frustration of fly fishing is not catching any fish. Sometimes no matter how advanced your casting skills, or how perfectly tied your flies, the fish simply will not rise. Trout are picky. And the task we set before ourselves is difficult: Attract fish to bite a hook wrapped in thread and wool.

When I am on the river, and nothing is happening, no matter what fly I use or where I cast, I become frustrated. I try to rationalize the situation. I say to myself: “I’ll just use this time to practice my casting.” That usually does not work for long. The sport is called fly fishing, not “fly casting”. On the other hand, it is not called “fly catching” either.

Over the years, I realized that frustration from not catching fish usually has to do with expectations. When I first taught myself to fly fish, I was lucky to see one or two bites in an entire afternoon. I was thrilled the first time I caught a trout on a dry fly, a small rainbow roughly eight inches. I was not frustrated by the other three hours of fishing, because I was learning.

After that first fish, I began to develop expectations. As my skills developed and I could catch many more fish in an afternoon, my expectations only continued to rise. Today, a few hours on the stream that do not yield a single bite might cause serious frustration.

Fly fishing is not the only time when we deal with expectations. Often in life, expectations can be a good thing. When a baseball coach demands one hundred and ten percent, it pushes the baseball player to new levels of athletic achievement. When a teacher gives a difficult assignment but the student finds a way to write a paper on Macbeth, they learn and grow. When a parent expects a child to do chores, work hard and treat others with respect, he or she becomes a better person

In religion, expectations are important as well. The Bible contains the 10 commandments, a list of expected behaviors such as do not steal and honor your father and mother. In its essence, Judaism expects people to be ethical and good. When Rabbi Hillel was asked what is the most important command of Judaism he said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the commentary. Now go and learn.” Likewise, God expects ethical behavior from us all. The prophet Micah said: “God has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Expectations from teachers, coaches and even religion can be a good thing when they motivate us to do or be better. But expectations on the fly fishing stream are probably a waste of time. Not too long ago, someone asked me for the most important tip in fly fishing. I said to him: “Be sure to look up from the river every once in a while, take a breath of air, hear the soft sound of the flowing water and appreciate the beauty of all that surrounds you.” In fly fishing, when I expect to catch trout, I am guaranteed to be frustrated. When I expect to be out in nature, to soak in the solitude of the stream and to leave behind the stress of the world, I find fulfillment. An afternoon of fly fishing always provides me with solace and a sense of peace.

I may still get frustrated when not a single fish rises. When that happens, I will try to remember the time I went fly fishing and left my rod behind. After I discovered that I could not fish, I decided to go hiking along the stream. I saw deer and ducks. I got stuck in “sinking mud,” almost becoming a permanent resident of the stream. I spent time outside, in nature, and I was able to look around, relax and appreciate the beauty of our world. And I learned that sometimes I can get what I want from a fly fishing trip without a rod and reel.

Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer is the author of The Fly Fishing Rabbi, and the associate Rabbi at North Shore Synagogue in Syosset, New York.

Afternoon limps away like a grocery clerk who shit his slacks. I head to the wharf. The neighbor’s son lent me his secondhand pole; the marina pours shrimp in a plastic bucket. I take the pole and bucket to where the ocean turns black, feathering municipal pilings with strands of chartreuse weed. It takes weeks to develop a pattern: Shrimp fastened to hooks, shrimp lowered to sheephead, sheephead fastened to shrimp, sheepehead removed from ocean, sheephead stacked in happy red sheephead piles, etc. Though in minutes, a genuinely ugly woman from Modesto, her retarded son and dog likely erase any achievement. Without warning, she grabs my finest sheephead and begins speaking abrasively about similarities between human and sheephead teeth. Not to be outdone, the son and dog position their faces close enough to the sheephead to precipitate an uncomfortable, multi-species stare down. When one sheephead involuntarily flares its gills, son and dog begin screaming and barking down the wharf in what appears a scripted conniption fit. The woman looks at me like a pedophile, throws my finest sheephead into the ocean, then asks what I did to her child? I tell her it was the sheephead, not me, to which she responds, “There’s something very wrong with you.” I turn away to watch the paper-white belly of my finest sheephead disappearing into black ocean … thunderheads erecting mountains above the horizon … a trawler flanked by seabirds … hummocked swell … until I can’t see another thing.

Stephen Elliot is a writer from the Bay.