Some of the best times I've had fishing with Captain Frank have been with my friend Jack Handey. In fact, it was Jack who introduced me to him. One evening after a successful day, Jack and I were heading back to Manhattan by boat—not Frank's boat, for complicated reasons, though he was aboard—and the boat came under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and into New York Harbor on the New Jersey side, and the setting sun was laying out lines of orange-tinted windows on the westward-facing buildings, and the tugboats were coming and going, and the ferryboats were gliding along, and the patrol boats hurrying, and here and there a sailboat was out on a sunset sail; and up above, helicopters dispersed pigeon-like in various directions from the building tops, and planes settled groundward to Newark Airport or took off from it; and even higher, jet trails ribbed like snake skeletons spread and faded across the sky's darkening blue. We passed the Statue of Liberty, now reduced to souvenir-shop size by the new high-rises behind it on the Jersey shore, and then on our right gaped the immense hole—permanently unfillable, probably, like a grief—in the part of the downtown sky where the World Trade Center towers used to be. Really, I hope that space is reoccupied by something, and soon, even if the hole can never be truly repaired, because right now when you come into the harbor the skyline looks undefined, like nothing; it looks weird.

Jack and I were drinking beer, sitting in the bow, observing the sights. We had caught some big bluefish on bunker flies, the action had been fast, with bait everywhere and whole flocks of birds chasing them. Coming home after such a day, the feeling is one of complete happiness, a state of mind I used to disdain but don't anymore. This story has no lesson but simple happiness, motoring into the harbor at sundown.

I think about all those hours Frank spent as a boy catching nothing on the Naughton Avenue jetty. What was the point in doing that? None at all, most people would say. When I was a kid in Ohio, I used to fish under an abandoned railroad bridge in a scrub forest by my house. I don't believe I ever caught a fish in that fishing hole. I remember the dark water under the bridge's low stone arch, and my red-and-white bobber floating back in there, always expectant and always undisturbed. A deep passion running through a person's life is itself a part of nature. Sitting under the forgotten bridge, waiting fruitlessly on the Naughton Avenue jetty, neither Frank nor I could have guessed how we'd be fishing today. The miracle is that in any and all circumstances, at least so far, the passion has stayed the same.